Large-Scale Experiments of Voided Shear Walls with Pre-Walls

Aiming to reducing the carbon footprint of concrete structures, there is a pressing need to optimize the geometry of concrete members, which in turn can reduce the amount of cement needed for construction. In this context, an experimental investi-gation was conducted on a common element in concrete buildings, namely shear walls. The experimental program included lateral monotonic testing up to failure of three full-scale voided shear walls, in addition to a reference specimen. The walls featured two outer precast pre-walls, a middle cast-in-place core with voids, and a cast-in-place tension flange. The introduced voids were circular with a fixed diame-ter for each of the specimens. The main test variable was the volumetric void ratio, which varied between 8.7% to 15.6%. The voided walls failed in a nearly identical manner by crushing of the concrete across the web. The experimental results show that the maximum reduction in strength for the walls is 22.5% compared to the solid wall without voids. Moreover, it is demonstrated that there is no significant reduc-tion in stiffness of these walls compared to the reference specimen. The results pre-sented in this paper illustrate the feasibility of optimizing the geometry of shear walls in order to reduce their carbon footprint.