Abstract
Structural walls have been mostly used for the design of reinforced concrete buildings in seismic areas because they play a role as an efficient bracing system and offer great potential for lateral load resistance and drift control. The lateral resistance system for the earthquake load should be designed to have enough ductility and stable hysteretic response in the critical regions where plastic deformation occurred beyond yielding. The behavior of the reinforced concrete element to experience large deformation in the critical areas by a major earthquake is affected by the performance of the confined core concrete. Thus, the confinement of concrete by suitable arrangements of transverse reinforcement results in a significant increase in both the strength and ductility of compressed concrete. This paper reports the experimental results of reinforced concrete structural walls for wall-type apartment structure under axial loads and cyclic reversal of lateral loads with different confinement of the boundary elements. The results show that confinement of the boundary element by open 'U'-bar and cross tie is effective. The shear strength capacity is not increased by the confinement but deformation capacity is improve.
