Seismic Performances of Reinforced Concrete Sandwich Walls

Construction systems based on cast-in-situ reinforced concrete sandwich (cRCSP) walls represent a very widespread solution for buildings, largely adopted also in earthquake-prone areas. Therefore, seismic performances assessment of such structural systems can be considered critical. This paper aims to contribute to the investigation about seismic behaviour of cast-in-situ reinforced concrete sandwich walls, first of all, starting from a detailed review of both the few experimental and analytical studies available in literature. The experimental results from literature have been collected in a proper reference database and the main existing shear-strength relationships, from codes and literature, have been implemented in order to compare their prediction with the experimental results. Finally, a technical guideline of the Italian Superior Council of Public Works has been considered for the evaluation of the behaviour factor of structural systems with cRCSP walls. The reasonable conservativeness of the so-estimated behaviour factor is confirmed by the analysis of the collected experimental results on the cRCSP walls, which can be extended to the global structural ductility if a sufficient regularity in-plain and in-elevation is provided. Further improvements could be obtained by proper product-testing.