RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE June 1–4, 2016 STR-830-1 ENHANCING THE DEFORMATION CAPACITY OF CONCRETE SHEAR WALLS REINFORCED WITH GFRP BARS Ahmed Hassanein Doctoral student, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada Nayera Mohamed Postdoctoral fellow, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada Ahmed Sabry Farghaly Postdoctoral fellow, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada Brahim Benmokrane Professor, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada NSERC Research Chair in FRP Reinforcement for Concrete Infrastructure Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in Advanced Composite Materials for Civil Structures ABSTRACT An experimental study was recently conducted to address the applicability of concrete shear walls entirely reinforced with glass-fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars and subjected to quasi-static reversed cyclic lateral loading in attaining reasonable strength and drift requirements specified in different codes. The reported test results clearly show that properly designed and detailed GFRP-reinforced concrete (RC) walls could reach their flexural capacities with no strength degradation. The results also demonstrate that the tested walls were able to achieve recoverable and self-centering behavior up to allowable drift limits before experiencing moderate damage and attain a maximum drift comparable to steel-RC walls. The promising results provide impetus for constructing shear walls with GFRP bars and constitute a step toward using GFRP bars in lateral-resisting systems. Since enhancing concrete confinement at the boundary might be a solution in attempting to increase the deformation capacity of GFRP-RC shear walls without significant loss of strength, a series of shear walls were constructed with different reinforcement confinement configurations at the boundary zone. This paper compares the first tested shear wall to a previously reported shear wall (Mohamed et al 2014a). The results show a significant increase in lateral drift and strength of almost 79% and 27%, respectively, by doubling the confinement reinforcement ratio of the boundary. The seismic behavior of the wall was obviously improved, and the deformability level was significantly enhanced. Keywords: Concrete, GFRP bars, cyclic loads, hysteretic behavior, shear walls, drift, stiffness, deformability. 1. INTRODUCTION Parking garages are one type of multistory building undergoing steel corrosion due to harsh climate conditions. Fiber-reinforced-polymer (FRP) bars have been innovatively used as reinforcement in many structural elements because of their corrosion resistance. As a new application for FRP reinforcement, full-scale shear walls reinforced with FRP bars under cyclic loading were recently tested as a primary lateral-resisting system typically used for parking garages. The results show that the FRP reinforced-concrete (RC) walls exhibited appropriate cyclic performance and possessed good deformation capacity in comparison to a steel-RC shear wall (Mohamed et al. 2014a). Mohamed et al. (2014a) carried out an experimental investigation of the applicability of reinforcing shear walls with GFRP bars in which the main parameters were steel versus GFRP reinforcing and different aspect ratios for GFRP-reinforced walls. The test matrix involved testing of four full-scale shear walls 3500 mm in height: one reinforced with steel bars and three with GFRP. Boundary-element reinforcement and diagonal bars were provided to eliminate sliding shear and ensure flexural domination. The test results show that all of the tested walls achieved