RESEARCH ARTICLE
Main Reasons of Structural Wall Collapse in Chile 2010 and New Zealand 2011 - Implications For Ecuador
Maria Cristina Avalos Aguilar*, Ana Gabriela Haro, Pablo Caiza Sánchez
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 469
Last Page: 480
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-10-469
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501610010469
Article History:
Received Date: 10/08/2015Revision Received Date: 4/03/2016
Acceptance Date: 21/03/2016
Electronic publication date: 29/08/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Previous works on the earthquakes of Chile 2010 and New Zealand 2011 indicate regular behavior of reinforced concrete buildings with structural walls. However, some buildings suffered significant damage associated with global or local collapse due to diagonal cracking and flexural-compression failure. Structural walls located at the ground floor presented tension-compression failure was probably provoked by high axial forces at the walls extreme ends which could cause this failure in places where there is a lack of bracing and confinement.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the behavior of the reinforced concrete structural wall buildings that failed in the mentioned earthquakes, and identify some of the main reasons that caused the damage as an attempt to improve engineering practices in Ecuador to prevent catastrophic events.