Seismic Response Analysis of a Reinforced Concrete Block Shear Wall Asymmetric Building

This paper presents detailed analyses of experimental results pertaining to the cyclic behavior of a reduced-scale reinforced masonry (RM) asymmetric building with walls aligned in two orthogonal directions. The current study focuses on analyzing the influence of twist, as a system-level effect, on the displacement and strength demands of the building’s individual seismic force resisting system (SFRS) wall components. The study evaluates the individual wall contributions to the overall building response characteristics within both the elastic and the inelastic response phases. Documentation of the compressive strains at the wall toes is also presented and correlated to the damage levels anticipated for each wall. In addition, the building center of rotation and center of strength are determined and the corresponding twist angles and moments and building torsional stiffness values are evaluated throughout the loading history. Moreover, the trends of stiffness degradation for the walls and for the building are presented, and the relationship between the individual walls’ and building’s stiffness is discussed. Finally, the trends of energy dissipation increase with increased building displacement ductility are established for different system-level ductility levels. The information presented in this paper is expected to provide useful benchmarking data that can contribute to the understanding of RM system-level response and how it compares to the behavior of individual RM SFRS components.