• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.475-485
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• 2022

This paper presents a comparative experimental study on structural behavior of the interlocking masonry walls under in-plane cyclic loading. The main purpose of this study is to increase lateral load-bearing capacities of masonry walls by using interlocking units. The interlocking units were designed by considering failure modes of masonry walls and produced using lightweight foamed concrete. To this end, three masonry walls which are hollow, fully grouted, and reinforced were constructed with interlocking units. Also, a traditional masonry brick wall was built for comparison reasons. The walls were tested under in-plane cyclic loading. Then, structural parameters of the walls such as lateral load bearing and total energy dissipation capacities, ductility, stiffness degradation as well as failure modes obtained from the tests were compared with each other. The results have shown that the walls with the interlocking units have better structural performance than traditional masonry brick walls and they may be used in the construction of low-rise masonry structures in rural areas to improve in-plane structural performance.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.85-92
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• 2019

This study was carried out to examine the effect of the presence of non-structural walls in apartment buildings subjected to an earthquake. It was believed that the presence of non-structural walls, which has not been considered in the structural design process, was usually built together with structural walls and this led to significant damages to the apartment buildings in Pohang earthquake, 2017. In this study, a 22-story apartment building was selected and modeled to simulate the seismic behavior due to earthquakes. The story drift, performance point, and compressive strain in the walls were the main parameters to evaluate the seismic performance with the presence of non-structural walls.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.201-208
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• 2003

In domestic, bearing wall apartment building have not rectangular walls but irregular walls which are designed at walls of various cross-sectional shapes such as H-shaped, T-shaped, Box-shaped and L-shaped. In these irregular walls connected with rigid joint each other, one side walls of irregular walls is expected to show effective behavior for rigid-jointed the other side walls. Moreover, previous studies have focused on simplifying irregular walls into rectangular walls because of the complication in structural design and analysis. So studies for variables affecting behaviors of irregular walls, such as aspect ratios and compressive strength of concrete, are insufficient. The objective of this study is to evaluate the behaviors of T-shaped structural walls with different concrete compressive strengths and aspect ratios by experimental works. Results of this experimental study show that flange wall is contributed to increase the flexural strengths by the variation of concrete strengths and aspect ratios, and that it is needed to evaluate the effect width of flange wall for rational wall design.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.681-695
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• 2013

In 1999 Marmara and 2011 Van earthquakes in Turkey, majority of the existing buildings either sustained severe damage or collapsed. These buildings include masonry infill walls in both the interior and exterior R/C frames. The material of the masonry infill is the main variant, ranging from natural stones to bricks and blocks. It is demanding to design these buildings for satisfactory structural behavior. In general, masonry infill walls are considered by its weights not by interaction between walls and frames. In this study, R/C buildings with infill walls are considered in terms of structural behavior. Therefore, 5 and 8-story R/C buildings are regarded as the representative models in the analyses. The R/C representative buildings, both with and without infill walls were analyzed to determine the effects of structural behavior change. The differences in earthquake behavior of these representative buildings were investigated to determine the effects of infill walls leading structural capacity. First, pushover curves of the representative buildings were sketched. Aftermath, time history analyses were carried out to define the displacement demands. Finally, fragility analyses were performed. Throughout the fragility analyses, probabilistic seismic assessment for R/C building structures both with and without infill walls were provided. In this study, besides the deterministic assessment methodology, a probabilistic approach was followed to define structural effect of infill walls under seismic loads.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 1999.04a
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• pp.525-528
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• 1999

Structural walls have been favored for the design of reinforced concrete buildings in seismic zone areas because they provide an efficient bracing system and offer great potential for lateral load resistance and drift control. Loads on structures due to earthquakes are not unlikely to reach, if not exceed, the design load levels. Hence, structural damage to walls is inevitable, and it is necessary to repair this damaged walls. Yet, information on repair method and data related to the strength and deformation characteristics of repaired walls is limited. In this study, specimens which have their aspect ratios of about 1 to 3 will be repaired. For the repairing the damaged walls, new concrete and new reinforcing bar are replaced with cracked concrete and the buckled reinforcing bar, respectively. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of the repaired structural walls in the capacity of strength, stiffness, and maximum deformation comparing with the undamaged walls.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.171-180
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• 2014

Since the execution of structural design by professional structural engineers is not mandatory for small-size buildings in Korea, structural design is conducted by architects or contractors resulting in concern about the seismic safety of the buildings. Therefore, the Korean Structural Engineers Association proposed dedicated structural design criteria in 2012. The criteria were developed based on a deterministic approach in which the structural members are designed only with information of story and span length of the buildings and without structural analyses. However, due to the short time devoted to their development, these criteria miss satisfactory basis and do not deal with structural walls popularly used in Korea. Accordingly, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport launched a research on the 'development of structural performance enhancement technologies for small-size buildings against earthquakes and climate changes'.. As part of this research, this paper intends to establish direction for the preparation of deterministic structural design guidelines for seismic safety of domestic small-size reinforced concrete buildings. To that goal, a typical plan of these buildings is selected considering frames only and frames plus walls, and then design is conducted by changing the number of stories and span length. Next, the seismic performance is analyzed by nonlinear static pushover analysis. The results show that the structural design guidelines should be developed by classifying frames only and frames plus walls. The size and reinforcement of structural elements should be provided in the middle level of the current Korean Building Code and criteria for small buildings by considering story and span length for buildings with frames only, and determined by considering the shape and location of walls and the story and span length as well for buildings with frames plus walls. It is recommended that the design of walls should be conducted by reducing the amount of walls along with symmetrically located walls.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.67-74
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• 2001

In domestic, irregular walls such as T, L, H and Box shapes are considered as rectangular wall in the design of bearing wall apartment building. The strengths of walls, therefore, can be underestimated in case of using the current design process. Irregular walls are connected to each other as rigid joint so that part of the load can be resisted by the wall perpendicular to the load direction. This resistance can be caused by the effective width of perpendicular wall. This additional resistance by the perpendicular wall increases the strength of structural walls. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effective widths of flanged walls with different aspect ratios by using FEM analyses. the results from finite element method are compared with effective flange widths of some code provisions.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.641-656
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• 2016

Reinforced concrete frame buildings with masonry infill walls are one of the most popular structural systems in the world. In most cases, the effects of masonry infill walls are not considered in structural models. The results of earthquakes show that infill walls have a significant effect on the seismic response of buildings. In some cases, the buildings collapsed as a result of the formation of a soft story. This study developed a simple method, called corner opening, by replacing the corner of infill walls with a very flexible material to enhance the structural behavior of walls. To evaluate the proposed method a series of experiments were conducted on masonry infill wall and reinforced concrete frames with and without corner openings. Two 1:4 scale masonry infill walls with and without corner openings were tested under diagonal tension or shear strength and two RC frames with full infill walls and with corner opening infill walls were tested under monotonic horizontal loading up to a drift level of 2.5%. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method reduced the strength of infill wall specimens but considerably enhanced the ductility of infill wall specimens in the diagonal tension test. Moreover, the corner opening in infill walls prevented the slid shear failure of the infill wall in RC frames with infill walls.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1251-1272
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• 2015

It is widely recognized that the preferred yielding mechanism for a hybrid coupled wall structure is that all coupling beams over the height of the structure yield in shear prior to formation of plastic hinges in structural walls. The objective of the study is to provide feasible approaches that are able to promote the preferred seismic performance of hybrid coupled walls. A new design methodology is suggested for this purpose. The coupling ratio, which represents the contribution of coupling beams to the resistance of system overturning moment, is employed as a fundamental design parameter. A series of nonlinear time history analyses on various representative hybrid coupled walls are carried out to examine the adequacy of the design methodology. While the proposed design method is shown to be able to facilitate the desired yielding mechanism in hybrid coupled walls, it is also able to reduce the adverse effects caused by the current design guidelines on the structural design and performance. Furthermore, the analysis results reveal that the state-of-the-art coupled wall design guidelines could produce a coupled wall structure failing to adequately exhaust the energy dissipation capacity of coupling beams before walls yield.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.713-732
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• 2015

The application of the compressive force path method for the design of earthquake-resistant reinforced concrete structural walls with a shear span-to-depth ratio larger than 2.5 has been shown by experiment to lead to a significant reduction of the code specified transverse reinforcement within the critical lengths without compromising the code requirements for structural performance. The present work complements these findings with experimental results obtained from tests on structural walls with a shear span-to-depth ratio smaller than 2.5. The results show that the compressive force path method is capable of safeguarding the code performance requirements without the need of transverse reinforcement confining concrete within the critical lengths. Moreover, it is shown that ductility can be considerably increased by improving the strength of the two bottom edges of the walls through the use of structural steel elements extending to a small distance of the order of 100 mm from the wall base.