Effect of displacement cycles on the drift capacity of reinforced concrete structural walls

Estimating the drift capacity (DC) of reinforced concrete (RC) structural walls is crucial to assess seismic performance of buildings in earthquake-prone regions. Numerous investigations have been conducted on the subject. Nevertheless, most of these investigations focus on walls without prior damage and a single expected earthquake. Recent tests conducted on RC walls suggest that displacement history does not affect DC, if the maximum amplitude of previous cycles is smaller than a threshold, regardless of the number of applied cycles. How to define such threshold and how prior cycles with amplitudes exceeding it affect DC remains unclear. This study assessed the effect of cyclic displacement history—or displacement cycles—on the DC of RC structural walls, using a statistical analysis. Results indicate that DC decreases as the intensity of cyclic displacement history increases. Nevertheless, this decrease is considerably smaller than differences between measured values of DC and estimates obtained using available empirical formulations and a calibrated machine learning algorithm.