The many advantages of reinforced concrete (RC) make it irreplaceable for countless infrastructures, and led it to become the dominant building material for medium‐to‐high rise construction around the world.
This project advances the understanding of the seismic behaviour of RC U‐shaped core walls by investigating two factors that commonly contribute to poor structural response and limit post-earthquake serviceability: torsional response and permanent (or residual) displacements, which are key in determining the post‐earthquake repairability of such structures.
Permanent displacements can be minimised through a mitigation principle that consists in replacing partially some of the longitudinal steel reinforcement at the base by smart (superelastic) alloy bars (Figure 1). ALL4wALL will demonstrate this technological innovation, contributing to ensure target performances for buildings with significantly longer service lives, which should be an aim for sustainable design and assessment.
The project is financed by ERIES, and will be carried out by a consortium of seven universities (Liège, Pavia, York - in Canada, ENPC ParisTech, Ljubljana, ISAE-Supméca) led by UCLouvain. It will finish with the testing of two 40-ton 6-m tall large-scale wall units (Figure 2) on the shake table of LNEC (Figure 3). The second unit will include shape-memory alloy rebars at the base to minimize the permanent deformations after the earthquake. The goal is to contribute to the design and assessment of structures with longer services lives.
An international blind prediction competition, organized by UCLouvain, will be launched around April 2023.
For more information: https://eries.eu/
Name of the project: ALL4wALL
Date (start and end): 2023.01 – 2024.06
Funding: ERIES (Engineering Research Infrastructure for European Synergies)
Budget: 200’000 € (transnational access to the experimental facility for 20 days, construction of units, travels, etc)
Partners: University of Liège, University of Pavia, ENPC ParisTech, University of Ljubljana, ISAE‐Supméca ‐ Institut supérieur de mécanique de Paris, York University (Canada)
