Displacement-based seismic design of buildings with thin reinforced concrete structural walls with a single curtain of welded wire mesh

In past decades, multistory housing buildings have been constructed in high-seismic-risk regions in Latin America using thin reinforced concrete (RC) walls as the primary earthquake-resistant structural system. Typically, these thin walls are built using a light amount of brittle welded wire mesh placed in a single curtain for longitudinal and transverse reinforcement. This type of construction system is convenient due to the higher speed of construction compared to construction with thicker walls and conventional reinforcement. However, the seismic design of thin walls in buildings is based mainly on limited experimental research, mainly on squat-thin RC walls. A limitation of thin RC walls is that a cold-drawn mesh has low ductility and low energy deformation capacity. Furthermore, thin walls that are subjected to earthquake loading could fail due to out-of-plane instability. A database of RC thin walls tested under compression-tension cycles or cyclic lateral loading by several authors is used in this study to review the mechanics of lateral instability of thin RC walls. This study's results are used to understand better the potential seismic behavior of thin RC walls with a single curtain of welded wire mesh fabric. The drift capacities of typical thin RC walls are estimated in a performance-based seismic design procedure for buildings with RC thin walls.