Analyses and Testing of Dincel Wall System Subjected to Severe Earthquake Loads

At the request of Dincel Construction Systems Pty Ltd, the specialist consultants at accessUTS were engaged to test and analyse the adequacy of Dincel-Wall for installation in seismic regions. accessUTS is a division of the University of Technology Sydney in Australia which provides specialist consultancy services to the Australian industry. The testing and analysis program was designed and completed over a period of 20 months. The experimental program consisted of fabricating two large wall specimens (2.8m high by 3.0m wide) namely “A” and “B” using the Dincel system. The specimen “A” was centrally reinforced and specimen “B” reinforced with minor reinforcement only as shown on the drawings at Appendix A at the end of this report. The specimen “B” with minor corner reinforcement is referred to as unreinforced wall specimen hereinafter. After curing, the unreinforced wall specimen “B” was initially tested on the UTS shake table facility using the strong ground motion record of Kobe earthquake of 1995 (Figure 2.1) and El Centro, California earthquake of 1940 (Figure 2.2) as input, representing large magnitude near field and far field earthquakes, respectively. The shake table tests clearly confirmed the strength of the unreinforced wall specimen “B” in withstanding typical large magnitude earthquakes. However, due to the much larger relative stiffness of these wall specimens compared to those used in multi-storey buildings as part of the shear wall system, the resulting inter-storey drifts were well below those demanded by large earthquakes and hence it was decided to subject these walls to push over tests to confirm their adequacy in providing the required displacement demand of 5.3 mm arrived at by Finite element analysis of a typical 7 storey concrete building with shear walls as its lateral load resisting system.