Pseudo-static experimental study on insulated sandwich concrete wall with embedded columns

Insulated sandwich concrete wall with embedded columns (ISCW-EC) is proposed in this paper. For ISCW-EC, the embedded column is cold-formed steel rectangular tube and horizontal distributed reinforcement is used in concrete layer. To evaluate the shear strength and seismic performance of ISCW-EC and to study the effect of the horizontal reinforcement spacing, low-frequency horizontal cyclic load tests were performed on four full-scale specimens. The test results show that the failure pattern of ISCW-EC is a combination of local buckling at the bottom of the embedded column and concrete crushing at corners. The bending-shear failure dominated by bending occurs in regular walls, while the shear failure occurs in L-shaped walls. The results also show if the spacing of horizontal distributed reinforcement is too small, a brittle failure occurs. The shear capacity, ductility and energy dissipation capacity are significantly improved with larger horizontal reinforcement spacing. In addition, ISCW-EC is compared with a sandwich wall without embedded columns, the results show that the embedded columns significantly improve the shear capacity and ductility of ISCW. •Insulated sandwich concrete wall with embedded columns (ISCW-EC) is proposed for the first time.•This kind of wall insulation layer is arranged continuously, having better insulation performance.•Specimen fails when the embedded column buckles and the concrete at corners is crushed.