Seismic performance of a novel partial precast RC shear wall with reserved cast-in-place base and wall edges

Abstract Precast reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls have attracted significant research efforts due to advantages over the conventional construction methods such as better quality control, shorter construction time and less environmental impact. Research efforts have been dedicated to exploring alternative methods for the connections of precast shear walls. In this paper, a novel partial precast shear wall is proposed, which is made of a precast shear wall with double-legs at the base, and reserved cast-in-place base zone and wall edges. To begin, the design concept of the proposed precast shear wall is described. A comprehensive experiment program is then presented, in which two groups of identical full-scale shear walls were designed, constructed and tested in a cyclic pseudo-static manner in order to investigate the seismic performance of the proposed wall. Each group consisted of three specimens, one cast-in-place and two proposed walls. These two groups of specimens were tested under a high axial load index of 0.3 and 0.4, respectively. The test results indicate that the failure modes of the proposed partial precast walls were similar with those constructed with cast-in-place method. For both axial load indices, the precast walls had comparable seismic performance with the cast-in-place walls in terms of lateral load capacity, stiffness degradation, steel strain behavior, energy dissipation, and residual displacement but better deformability and ductility. In addition, higher axial load indices resulted in decrease in ductility and increase in residual displacements. Moreover, the same precast walls in the same group had similar performance, providing confidence in the repeatability of the test results and stable performance of the proposed walls. It can come to the conclusion that the proposed partial precast shear walls can have comparable and stable seismic performance with the conventional cast-in-place method and hence can be taken as an alternative in practice.