Displacement-Based Design of Precast Walls with Additional Dampers

Most traditional structures designed according to current seismic code provisions will sustain important residual deformations after a design-level earthquake. In many cases, such damage would lead to extensive and costly retrofitting of the structure even if they performed as expected by ensuring life safety. A new emerging technology that controls the response of a structure during the design-level earthquake to specified displacement limits and sustains negligible damage and residual deformations is herein investigated. It consists of precast concrete walls post-tensioned with partially unbonded cables, allowed to rock at the foundation and coupled with artificial dampers. A numerical model is presented and validated through comparison with previous experimental results. The displacement based design procedure initially proposed by Priestley et al. [2007] is then extended and adapted to the rocking wall systems. The new design procedure is then applied to a set of case study structures of 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 stories and validated through nonlinear dynamic analyses, which indicate excellent results.