New experimental findings on the stability of thin reinforced concrete walls

Damage to structural walls in the recent earthquakes in Chile (2010) and New Zealand (2011) demonstrated that modern reinforced concrete (RC) walls may not achieve the expected ductile response and these walls could possibly fail due to global and local buckling. This paper describes the experimental test of an extensively instrumented thin RC wall subjected to in-plane loading. However, the wall experienced significant out-of-plane deformations, which ultimately triggered member failure at the local level. Through a detailed evaluation of measured experimental data including that collected from optical sensors, the observed wall performance is more accurately realized. Finally, suggestions for improving existing phenomenological wall models for out-of-plane behaviour and the corresponding numerical simulation tools are provided.