Behaviour of dissipating angles for rocking hybrid ductile concrete wall systems

With the Precast Seismic Structural Systems (PRESSS) program in the 90’s, rocking hybrid systems began to be developed as seismic structural solutions. Nowadays these systems already have some real applications. The referred systems depend on a balance between elastic and plastic behaviour of prestress and hysteretic dissipaters. Recently, solutions using external hystereticm dissipaters showed to be an improved solution. These solutions are easy to inspect and replace after an earthquake and can also be used for retrofit. It is important to predict accurately ductility and strength to have the desired
hysteretic behaviour. This work shows the experimental and analytical study developed with angles to be designed as external dissipaters for precast concrete walls. In the experimental work, 5 angles were tested with a cyclic protocol that led to the optimization of the angles. This was complemented
by an analytical study using the finite elements program Adina. The work showed that angles have a good hysteretic behaviour and can be used as external dissipaters.