Post-earthquake Performance Evaluation of Shear Walls with Shape Memory Alloy

Residual displacement of reinforced concrete (RC) structures can be utilized to assess their post-earthquake seismic performance. Earlier studies have focused on improving the post-earthquake functionality of RC walls by using re-centering devices or materials. Superelastic shape memory alloys (SE-SMA) have received considerable attention from the seismic community because of their appealing superelastic feature and good energy dissipation capacity. However, limited attempts have been focused on the investigation of their post-earthquake performance. This paper utilizes an approximate method recently proposed in the literature to estimate the residual drift demands at the end of the earthquake of SE-SMA RC walls. Additionally, new equations are proposed and validated before they are applied. To perform the evaluation, three SE-SMA RC walls assumed to be in a high seismic zone with different heights were analyzed and detailed according to current ACI-318 and ASCE7 codes. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed equations to estimate residual displacement for rapid evaluation. Finally, based on a residual seismic capacity index (R) using proposed equations, a damage rating procedure is applied to determine specific damage levels of SE-SMA RC shear walls.