Experimental Study Characterizing Retrofitting Method for Shear Walls at Nuclear Plant

One method of improving the earthquake resistance of shear walls protecting existing nuclear power plants is to retrofit the wall by installing additional rebars with concrete to produce a monolithic structure. We conducted a static loading test to confirm the structural performance of the walls when in-plane and out-of-plane shear forces act on the concrete joint faces produced by this retrofitting method. The test specimens consisted of those in which the concrete joint face was treated differently and a monolithically cast specimen for comparative purposes. The test results showed that the different treatments of the concrete joint face had very little effect on the strength or deformation performance, which were confirmed to be the same as those of the monolithically cast specimen.