Rohit Gokhale

MSc research (2018-present)

Title: Axial cyclic behaviour of RC prisms representing wall boundary zones

Student: Rohit Gokhale

Senior Supervisor: Prof. Rajesh Dhakal

Co-Supervisor(s): Dr. Farhad Dashti and Mayank Tripathi

Performance of a flexurally-dominated RC wall against in-plane lateral cyclic actions depends on the response of its confined end regions known as the boundary zones. This project has been investigating the behaviour of RC prisms representing wall boundary zones under uniaxial cyclic loading. This research has involved both experimental and analytical investigations, and is carried out in three phases.

Two different uniaxial cyclic loading protocols have been developed based on an extensive numerical analysis carried out on a validated RC wall model under a suite of ordinary and near fault ground motions, respectively. The average inelastic strain histories developed at the boundaries of numerical model are adopted and a simplified loading protocol for testing RC boundary zone prisms is proposed (Gokhale et al. 2019a). An experimental investigation is designed and conducted to evaluate the effects of loading history and cross-sectional detailing on the response of concrete columns representing boundary zones of RC walls (Gokhale et al. 2019b). The experimental results are currently being utilized to investigate the ability of axial cyclic behaviour of RC prisms to represent the cyclic lateral response of the corresponding RC walls and the implications of this simplified approach. The following figure displays the test setup and the different modes of failure observed in this study.