QuakeCoRE has given New Zealand researchers the opportunity to access some of the world’s top earthquake engineering facilities. A system level shake-table test of a full-scale low-damage concrete wall building has been conducted on the multi-functional shake-table array at Tongji University as part of the ILEE-QuakeCoRE international collaborative research project. The test aimed to verify the seismic response of a low-damage concrete wall building implementing state-of-art design concepts and practical construction details that are currently being used in New Zealand buildings.

The 2-storey test building was designed with post-tensioned (PT) walls that provide the primary lateral-load resistance in both directions and a frame that utilised slotted beam connections. Precast concrete double tees were used for the first floor and a steel tray composite floor was used for the second floor. Conventional flexible wall-to-floor connections and isolating device-type wall-to-floor connections were used for longitudinal and transverse directions, respectively. A number of alternative energy dissipation devices were also installed at wall base or/and beam-column joints of the building. The building was subjected to 39 tests with a range of intensity ground motions, incorporating both unidirectional and bi-directional testing on the structure with different combinations of wall strength and energy dissipating devices. The 360 channels of test data has provided a significant dataset to verify design procedures, detailing practice, and numerical models.

Overall, the building performed extremely well during the intense series of tests, providing confidence that the new low-damage concrete buildings are an excellent low-damage building solution. The building exhibited only minor damage, with distributed cracking in the floors and cosmetic spalling in the wall toes that could be easily repaired.