Experimental tests of thin RC U-shaped walls with a single layer of reinforcement

Reinforced concrete (RC) U-shaped core walls are commonly used in buildings to provide lateral resistance for wind and earthquake actions. While there is an abundance of these structural elements within the building stocks of both low-to-moderate and high seismic regions, there have been few experimental studies focusing on the seismic resistance of RC walls with a U-shaped cross-section. Building codes in some Latin American countries, such as Colombia, currently allow very thin RC walls with a single layer of reinforcement to be constructed. This type of construction is similar to practices in Australia, prior to the revised Concrete Structures building code coming into effect in 2019. Large-scale tests of two thin RC U-shaped walls with a single layer of vertical reinforcement were conducted in the Earthquake Engineering Structural Dynamics Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. This paper presents some of the test setups and loading protocols used to test the walls, as well as the initial results, including local and global failure modes