Superelastic alloy rebars for improved seismic response of reinforced concrete wall buildings

Details

Supervisors

Saraiva Esteves Pacheco De Almeida, João ; Hoult, Ryan

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil des constructions, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Nowadays, earthquakes in addition to killing thousands of people each year (45000 people killed/year) lead to high economic losses. Modern codes fulfil the ductile failure objectives during rare or very rare earthquakes, while new objectives propose a new performance level of repairable buildings after these seismic events. Shape Memory Alloy, used as reinforcement can help to achieve this goal, a new material that has the ability to recover large strains upon removal of stress is studied in this master thesis, NiTi rebars, an alloy of Nickel and Titanium, are used for the experimental tests. Three RC beams of 2m x 0.19m x 0.15m are built, the first one as a control beam, the two others with 10cm of NiTi at mid-span (in the plastic hinge). The beams were tested in three point-bending. A new connection was studied, welded rather than a mechanical coupler, optical fibres were used to determine the strains in the rebars. A numerical study is conducted and the results are compared with the experimental results.