Tenth U.S.

National Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Frontiers of Earthquake Engineering
July 21-25, 2014
10NCEE Anchorage, Alaska

SEISMIC STUDY OF HYBRID SHEAR

WALL
Xu, L.1 , Shen, X.2 and Shen, J.3

ABSTRACT

The paper presents an experimental and associated numerical study on a hybrid shear wall
system as a seismic force resisting element for taller buildings. Different from traditional
“sandwich” shear wall, the hybrid shear wall in the study consists of two exterior precast wall
layers and one interior cast-in-place concrete layer. This type of wall system has been
increasingly used in moderate- to high-rise buildings in low-seismicity areas, and its seismic
behavior is little known. Revealing its corresponding seismic behavior will help develop a
rational seismic design details for ductile seismic force resisting system as a formidable
alternative to conventional cast-in-place shear walls by combining inherent the benefits of
speedy construction and sustainability of precast technology with improved structural integrity
and ductility.

In this research study, both experimental observation and FEM simulation validation were used
to analyze the hybrid shear wall system. Three sets of full-scale shear walls including two hybrid
shear walls and one cast-in-place shear wall were tested subjected to cyclic horizontal. A series
of 3D non-linear finite element models which included all significant details and specifications
were created in ABAQUS to simulate the experiments. The pushover analysis method was
employed to reproduce the test procedures. The response of the structure was computed both at
macro and micro levels in order to validate the accuracy of the analytical model. After a good
agreement between the experimental observations and simulation results, a comprehensive
parametric study was conducted to determine seismic design parameters, and to explore damage
mechanism of the hybrid shear wall system.

1
Dept. of CAEE, Illinois Institute of Technology, IL 60616
2
Dept. of Civil Engineering, Anhui University of Architecture, China 230009
3
Dept. of CCEE, Iowa State University, IA 50011

Lifeng Xu, Xiaopu Shen and Jay Shen. Seismic Study of Hybrid Shear Wall. Proceedings of the 10th National
Conference in Earthquake Engineering, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Anchorage, AK, 2014.
 Tenth U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering
Frontiers of Earthquake Engineering
July 21-25, 2014
Anchorage, Alaska

Seismic Study of Hybrid Shear Wall

Xu, L.1 , Shen, X.2 and Shen, J.3

ABSTRACT

The paper presents an experimental and associated numerical study on a hybrid shear wall system
as seismic force resisting structures for taller buildings. Different from traditional “sandwich”
shear wall, the hybrid shear wall in the study consists of two exterior precast wall layers and one
interior cast-in-place concrete layer. This type of wall system has been increasingly used in
moderate- to high-rise buildings in low-seismicity areas, and its seismic behavior is little known.
Revealing its corresponding seismic behavior will not only help develop theoretical background
for design, but also will help to take advantage of it: less labor, less contamination, good integrity
as cast-in-place shear wall, etc. In this research study, both experimental observation and FEM
simulation validation were used to analyze the hybrid shear wall system. Three sets of full-scale
shear walls including two hybrid shear walls and one cast-in-place shear wall were tested
subjected to vertical pressure and cyclic horizontal load in Anhui University of Architecture,
China (2010). A series of 3D non-linear finite element models which included all significant
details and specifications were created in ABAQUS to simulate the experiments. The pushover
analysis method was employed to reproduce the test procedures. The response of the structure was
computed both at macro and micro levels in order to validate the accuracy of the analytical model.
After good agreements between the experimental observations and simulation results were
consistently achieved, a comprehensive parametric study was conducted to determine seismic
design parameters, and to explore damage mechanisms and design optimization of the hybrid
shear wall system.

1. Introduction

The shear wall system could be categorized into precast shear wall and cast-in-place
shear wall according to distinct construction technology. Engineers are searching for a new shear
wall system that could balance two wall systems’ advantage together, which is to construct an
ideal shear wall under a neat environment and less labor but finally gets a better global seismic
resisting capacity. This is the orient motivation for this research about the “sandwich” shaped
hybrid shear wall system.

According to the PCI committee’s agreement [1], “the production history of precast
sandwich shear wall panels in North America was traced to 50 years ago”. A lot of theoretical

1
Dept. of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, IL 60616
2
Dept. of Civil Engineering, Anhui University of Architecture, China 230009
3
Dept. of CCEE, Iowa State University, IA 50011

Lifeng Xu, Xiaopu Shen and Jay Shen. Seismic Study of Hybrid Shear Wall. Proceedings of the 10th National
Conference in Earthquake Engineering, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Anchorage, AK, 2014.
analyses and experiments have been done towards the traditional “sandwich” shear wall [2-5].
Different from traditional walls, the “sandwich” shaped hybrid shear wall includes a cast-in-
place concrete layer to replace the inner insulation layer in order to get better system integrity
and ductility. This type of shear walls has been used for non-seismic design of buildings, its
seismic behavior remains unknown. Both experimental and numerical simulation studies were
conduct to investigate the hybrid shear wall to reveal its cyclic behavior and explore design
details leading to a ductile seismic design of such system.

2. Experimental Study

Three full scale sets of confirmatory tests with different forms of wall panels are
presented:
Wall 1 (W1) is a cast-in-place shear wall panel as a comparison specimen; Wall 2 (W2) is
a hybrid shear wall with a rigid panel connection (reinforcement enhanced area), Wall 3 (W3) is
also a hybrid shear wall but with less reinforcement in the connection.
W1 is a continuous panel with the dimensions of 2800(h) ×2000(w)×200(t)mm which is
cast in field, while the hybrid wall panel W2 and W3 are consists of two precast panels with the
dimension of 2800(h)×1000(w)×200(t)mm. In the hybrid shear wall, the thickness of exterior
precast wall panel at two ends is 50mm, with a reserved 100mm in between as the cast-in-place
concrete with reinforced enhanced core. The “H” shaped supporting is 550mm height which is
fixed to the ground by the anchor bolts; the top beam connecting to the electrolyte servo systems
in the vertical and horizontal direction.
All the shear walls are connected to the supporting and the beam by reinforced enhanced
area, which consists of the Ф6@200 rebar symmetrically extended from one component to
another among the cast-in-place concrete. The difference between the W-2 and W-3 is the
reinforced enhanced zone in the middle portion of the cast-in-place layer, the specifications as
shown in Fig. 1.
 W2 Plan Form

W2 Side View W3 Side View

W3 Plan Form

Figure 1. “Sandwich” Hybrid Shear Wall Panel Experiment Settings

2.1 Accessory Test

Field-cast shear wall sample W-1 with concrete intensity rating 30. The bearing steel
inside it is HRB 335. The precast wall panels in sample W-2,W-3 , intensity rating C35/45 came
from German Silwade Company. The bearing steel inside the precast wall panels is BSt500.
After shipped in cargo containers to home labs from abroad concrete-filled cores are re-casted
on the spot to be superimposed cores. The concrete intensity rating is C30 and steels are HPB235
and HRB335. The mechanical properties of the major materials as follows,
 Table 1. Steel Mechanical Properties

Diameter Grade Yield Strength Failure Strength Elongation (%)

(mm) (MPA) (MPA)

CHN 6 HRB235 330.0 492.5 29.0

CHN 8 HRB235 290.0 455.0 29.0
CHN10 HRB335 523.3 618.3 23.7

CHN12 HRB335 521.7 610.0 24.3

GRM 6 BSt500 613.1 644.0 8.3
GRM 8 BSt500 589.2 638.9 9.5
GMN10 BSt500 560.5 603.8 15.5
GRM 12 BSt500 556.0 628.1 17.0
GRM14 BSt500 532.3 609.3 21.0

Table 2. Cubic Compressive Strength of Concrete

Specimen Specimen Specimen Average(MPA)

1(MPA) 2(MPA) 3(MPA)
Cast-in-Place 29.4 29.8 30.7 30.3
Wall Specimen
Hybrid Wall 27.9 29.2 29.3 28.8
Internal Core

2.2 Loading History

Loadings in two direction are applied on the test members:

The vertical pressure force is about 600KN according to the pull down ratio 0.1 Vertical
loading employs counterforce rack device. When loading, first apply 40% of the full loading
pressure force to the top of the wall and repeat this 2-3 times in order to remove the mal-
conformation in the internal structure of samples. Then the axial pressure force is added to the
full load and remains unchanged in the trials.
The horizontal load is low-cycle repeated loading, which is divided into two phases:
Phase 1 employ load control with the loading pace 50KN.First to have monotonic step loading to
crack; then add the range, 25KN of the limit load, to the building blocks yielding and all-level
loading recycles once at the same time. In Phase 2, to employ displacement control, with step
loading according to the times of apex displacing while yielding and recycling twice.

2.3 Experimental Result and Observations

Several observations and conclusions are summarized according to the above

experiments,
1. Based on the envelope area of hysteresis curves below, Cast-in-place Shear Wall
performances an excellent energy dissipate capacity, while the hybrid shear wall with rigid
connections has a better capacity than that with moderate connections, which indicates the
importance of the rigid connection in seismic resisting capacity of hybrid shear wall.

W1 W2 W3
Figure 2. Hysteresis Curve of Different Shear Walls

2. The force state and breakage form of hybrid shear wall panels are in accordance with
the cast-in-place shear wall on the whole, which all belong to bending -shear failure.
3. Comparing the testing processes of wall panel samples W-1.W-2 and W-3, it shows
that the locations for initial cracks to appear are basically the same; the cracks trends and
macroscopic distributions are similar; the locations of the maximum cracks are basically the
same, all within the range of 500mm-700mm (0.25-0.35 ratio of the total height) above the
bottom of the wall panel.
4. No relative slide between the exterior precast concrete layers and interior cast-in-place
layer is visible by naked eyes.
5. Unlike the cast-in-place shear wall, the compression crush zone in hybrid shear wall is
partially cracking instead of whole section cracking.
6. The maximum drift ratio is approximately 1.6% for hybrid shear wall under the current
experiment.

3. FEM Simulation

As we know, experimentation is more accurate, however it’s time consuming and

definitely very costly. Nowadays, computer simulation is really capable of capturing the major
failure modes and showing comparable results with actual test specimens. Thus, in order to
explore single hybrid wall’s seismic behavior under the distinct parameters, convincing
numerical models should be created and validated by the comparison between the experimental
observations and simulation results. 3-D models were then set up in ABAQUS following
experimental specifications accordingly.
Top Girder
W-1 Section Top-view

Shear Wall
W-2 Section Top-view
A A
Supporting W-3 Section Top-view
A-A Section

Figure 3. Model Setting in ABAQUS

3.1 3D Nonlinear Finite Element Model

3.1.1 Material Model

As a main component in shear wall, concrete mechanical behavior plays an important

role through the whole simulation procedure, and the model’s mechanical capacity and fracture
mode is very sensitive to the concrete input data, Improper concrete definition will not only lead
to un-precise simulation results but also result in a negative Eigen-value which finally cause
FEM calculation error. The chosen of the concrete material model is the most critical step
among whole simulation, since concrete is a typical quasi-brittle material and it is difficult to
represent stiffness degradation caused by micro-cracks growth. Also, the concrete’s compression
strength will be dramatically enhanced due to the confinement effect which is already proved by
the existing experiments nowadays[10]. Accordingly, in current simulation, concrete model is
based on the balance of plastic damage model[8,9] and Mander’s confinement model[10].
What’s more, noticing that the steel data from accessory test could not directly be applied
into the simulation, in order to take into consideration of rebar’s pinch effect, true stress are
adopted instead of nominal stress in the ABAUQS according to the following equations,
σtrue= σnominal(1+εnominal) (1)
εtrue= ln(1+εnominal) (2)
where σnominal and εnominal is the nominal stress and strain from test, σtrue and εtrue is the
corresponding true stress in Eq.1 and 2.

3.1.2 Element and Model Specifications

All the components’ dimensions, locations, cross sections are precisely according to the
existing experiments: shear walls connected to the beam and the support by the inter rebar; this
wall mesh is refined at lower portion since the concrete cracking mainly occur at that position;
the friction coefficient between the precast wall panel is assumed to be 0.3; the rebar is
embedded to the concrete and the cohesive behavior is considered.
Solid elements(C3D8R) are adopted for concrete simulation and truss element(T3D2) for
rebar, 32 surface contact pairs are adopted to simulate the contact or friction behavior among the
cast-in-place layer, two precast panels, beam and the support, reference point and the rigid body
is applied on the top beam so as to make sure that the beam failure is excluded in the simulation.
Dynamic explicit method is used in simulation, there are totally two steps: step one is to
apply vertical load, step two is to apply horizontal load(using displacement control), both of the
above steps are adopting smooth steps to guarantee the accuracy and efficiency quasi-static
analyses .

3.2 Comparison Between the Experiment and Simulation

3.2.1 Load-displacement Curve.

In the analysis model, different friction coefficients between the cast-in-place layer and
the precast concrete layer were adopted, varying from 0.3 to 0.5, also limit to the fact that the
Mander’s concrete model theory is based on his experiment test whose confinement is stronger
than current experiment, the behavior of confined concrete should be somehow between the
Mander’s concrete model and the plain concrete model, thus several level of concrete models
were used to represent its corresponding behavior, especially for the compression decay.

Figure 4. Force-Displacement Comparison

The above curves (Fig. 4) indicate that the horizontal resisting capacity of shear wall is
very close between the experiments records and the FEM simulation results, the W2 has a larger
lateral resisting capacity since it has a more rigid reinforced enhanced area embedding in the
panel connection. The initial stiffness in W-1 and W-2 matches good, while in W-3 simulation
results is larger than the experimental results, this phenomenon might due to the factor of
experiment setting ,most probably the foundation is not as rigid as assumed. The over strength
factor in W-2 (Ωo≈1.6)is larger than W-1and W-3(Ωo≈1.1),indicating that the hybrid shear wall
with a more reinforced enhanced in connection has a larger potential lateral resisting capacity
beyond system yielding than W-1 and W-3.

3.2.2 Cracking process(take W-2 test as an example).

The cracking process for hybrid shear wall in ABAQUS validate the experimental
observation records for W-2 member:" When peak value of the horizontal load added to +225kN，
initial horizontal cracks appear at the side of the wall of 680mm above the bottom of the pulled
sidewall with the length of around 450mm. When loaded to +300kN, the second horizontal crack
appears at 450mm above the bottom of the wall"

Stage I(Monotonic) Stage II(Monotonic) Experiment Observations (Cyclic)

Figure 5. Concrete Cracking Developing Process (South Side View)

A remarkable simulation result is that according to the experiment, the largest plastic
range mainly concentrates in the vicinity of the section in connection between the supporting and
the interior concrete layers, which is also proved by the compression damage according to Von
Mises as in Fig. 6, In the contour plot, the largest compression damage occur around two end
rebar which connect the middle portion concrete and the support, two exterior precast wall
panels suffer less damaged than the interior cast-in-place layer. Actually there should be some
micro compression damage at the zone 1 and zone 2 which may not be captured by experimental
observations.

Zone 2

Zone 1

Figure 6. Largest Plastic Area Comparison

3.3.3 Maximum equivalent plastic strain. (Take W-1 as an example)

Since Wall 1 is cast-in-place concrete shear wall panel, accordingly, there is no

connection or exterior precast panels involved in the simulation. Different from the hybrid shear
wall (Seen from Fig. 7), the destroy pattern in the crushing zone is whole cross section cracking
instead of partial cracking.
.

Side View

Max Point
Tension zone cracking

Crushing zone

U-1 Displacement

Figure 7. PEEQMAX for Shear Walls

3.4.Parametric Study

Many parameters may influence the shear wall’s mechanism, but among them, emphasis
should mainly be placed on the height/width ratio, axial compression level, longitudinal rebar
spacing, longitudinal rebar ratio and wall thickness, based on the experience gained from the
traditional shear wall system research.
The good agreements between the experimental observations and simulation results indicate
the validity of the previous prototype, based on this prototype, dozens of different trail models
with different levels were then created and analyzed in ABAQUS to look insight into the
parameter influence. The results are concluded in the conclusion which may help for the design
optimism.

4.Conclusions

The results of an experimental campaign on “sandwich” hybrid shear wall panels with
different connection, used as seismic resisting wall panels, have been presented. Subsequently
numerical simulation results with linear and non-linear finite element models were also carried
out. Through the above study, several useful observations and simulation results are summarized
to help us to better understand the hybrid shear wall’s seismic mechanism.
(1) Comparing to cast-in-place shear wall, the hybrid shear wall is less effective in energy
dissipation, and the larger longitudinal rebar ratio in hybrid shear wall panel connection will
benefit its cyclic behavior.
(2) Under the monotonic load, there is no much difference between the cast-in-place
wall’s strength level and hybrid wall’s. However, the fracture pattern in compression zone is
different. For cast-in-place wall, its whole section crushed at the compression corner, while for
hybrid wall, only the middle portion of concrete cross section bulb out.
 (3) The fracture drift ratio of the hybrid shear wall is approximately 1.6% in current
experiments, based on the assumption from FEMA 695 that states the ultimate displacement as
the displacement at a level 80% of the capping strength in the descending branch of the pushover
curve.
(4) Shear wall’s cracking diagonal is mainly determined by the height/width (H/W) ratio,
high diagonal cracking trends are expected in seismic design since high H/W ratio usually lead to
ductile fracture.
(5) Axial force and the longitudinal rebar ratio are critical to the shear wall’s strength
level. The longitudinal rebar spacing has few to do with the lateral resisting capacity.
(6) Longitudinal rebar ratio is sensitive to the system’s over-strength ratio(Ω0), while
different compression level and wall thickness result in the same Ω0.

Acknowledgement

The financial support provided by Silwade Precast L.T.D in German, is gratefully

acknowledged. The technical support of the laboratory staff at the Anhui University of
Architecture and the research group in Dept. of CAEE of Illinois Institute of Technology, is
greatly appreciated.

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