Experimental Study Of Reinforced Concrete Coupling Beams With Axial Restraint

Coupled shear walls are a lateral load resisting system used in buildings to resist seismic and wind loads. In coupled walls, coupling beams span between adjacent shear walls and are typically located at floor level. Coupling beams are designed to yield and form plastic hinges before the wall piers. Damage patterns observed after the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence in New Zealand showed instances in which coupled walls did not behave as intended in design, as plastic hinges formed at the base of the wall piers but not at the beam ends. The Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission suggested that this undesirable response may have been caused by coupling beam axial restraint from walls and floors increasing the strength of the coupling beams.To better understand the effect of axial restraint on coupling beam behavior, seven one-half-scale reinforced concrete coupling beams were designed using ACI 318-19 and were constructed and tested. The main test variables were span-to-depth ratio, reinforcement configuration (conventional or diagonal), primary reinforcement ratio and bar diameter, and level of axial restraint. Six beams consisted of three identical pairs, with the two beams in each pair tested at a different level of constant stiffness axial restraint.Test results indicated that axial restraint, which is not included in the ACI 318-19 equation for nominal shear strength of diagonally reinforced coupling beams, increased the beam strength. Axial restraint also influenced the load-displacement responses of the beams and the observed damage patterns. The conventionally reinforced beams were observed to yield in shear, while damage concentrated at the ends of the diagonally reinforced beams. The onset of significant strength degradation in the diagonally reinforced beams was associated with buckling of diagonal reinforcement rather than crushing of confined concrete, such that variation in axial compression on identical pairs of beam did not lead to a significant difference in deformation capacity. Test beams with #6 diagonal reinforcement had improved deformation capacity over those with #4 diagonal reinforcement, due to the influence of the ratio of transverse reinforcement spacing to diagonal bar diameter (s/db) on bar buckling.