Notkun á bitastangalíkani til að herma burðarþolstilraunir á járnbentum steinsteyptum burðarveggjum

Reinforced concrete (RC) structural walls are the most common structural system in Icelandic buildings to resist lateral seismic loads. Over the centuries, destructive earthquakes have frequently impacted the country’s most active seismic zones, causing significant effects on people, buildings, and infrastructure. To assess earthquake response of structures, it is valuable to have access to reliable computational models. A blind test competition in earthquake engineering is a research challenge where participants are tasked with predicting the behavior or performance of a structural system under seismic loading without prior knowledge of the actual experimental results. It gives engineers and researchers the opportunity to identify strengths and weaknesses in current modeling approaches. Recently, a two-part international blind test competition took place. The first part was hosted by the UCLouvain University in Belgium, where two identical U-shaped structural walls tested quasi-static under flexure and torsion loads. The second part of the blind test competition took place in Portugal in 2024. There, an identical Ushaped load-bearing wall was constructed and then tested on a shake-table. A research group from the University of Iceland participated in this second part of the competition. A numerical model was developed using the beam-truss modeling strategy and the open-source software OpenSees to predict test results. This modeling strategy is well suited for simulating RC wall inplane responses, where shear deformations and shear cracks can occur. Before participating in the blind tests, the modeling strategy was first tested and compared to available test data from experiment with two abutment walls at the University of Iceland. This paper describes the beamtruss modeling strategy and how it was utilized to simulate the abutment walls experimental results as well as the shake-table tests from the second part of the blind competition. Following the announcement of the competition results, the numerical model was further refined to obtain more accurate results. Overall, the results from all the experiments were successfully simulated, and important experience and increased skills were gained from the research project.