Seismic analysis of innovative hybrid steel concrete coupled walls

An innovative hybrid steel concrete coupled wall made by a single reinforced concrete wall connected to two steel side columns by means of dissipative steel links is considered in this study. Such a hybrid system is conceived to take advantage of the stiffness of the reinforced concrete wall and of the dissipation capacity of the steel links acting as dissipative fuses that can be replaced if damaged. The performance of the studied structural system under seismic conditions is assessed by means of multi-record nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis. To this end a set of buildings is designed following a recently proposed ductile design approach and varying two parameters: the building height and the degree of coupling between the steel columns and the reinforced concrete wall. A material and geometric nonlinear finite element model developed within an open source software is introduced and the main results of the numerical analyses are presented to provide insight into the expected seismic response. Overall, the outcomes of the numerically simulated response results indicate that the proposed hybrid steel concrete coupled wall has interesting potentialities as seismic resisting system being able to effectively exploit the lateral stiffness of the RC wall as well as the dissipation capacity of the steel links.