In a recently completed collaborative research project funded by the National Science Foundation, seismic behavior of three cast-in place concrete walls and an equivalent precast wall system was studied. The first three walls were identical except for the anchorage of the wall longitudinal reinforcement into the footing. The first wall was constructed using longitudinal reinforcement without any splices along the length, the second wall used mechanical splices at the foundation interface to connect the starter bars from the footing to wall reinforcement and the third wall used conventional splices near the wall base. In addition, a fourth alternative was examined by using a precast wall system connected to the foundation only using unbonded post-tensioning tendons. This wall system uses a Precast Wall with End Columns, thus known as PreWEC, was designed to offer superior seismic response qualities over the cast-in-place alternatives. All four walls were studied experimentally and analytically using large-scale units subjected to cyclic lateral loading.

The presentation will focus on the motivation for the study, introduction to PreWEC, experimental and analytical findings of research, and required changes to improve wall behavior under seismic conditions. The benefits of NEES, active real-time collaboration and improvements made to the OpenSees fiber-based simulation will also be discussed.