Seismic behavior of coupled wall structure with innovative quickly replaceable coupling beams

In order to improve the seismic resilience of coupled wall structure, coupling beam with fuse has been developed to reduce the post-earthquake damage. However, the fuses often have a build-up I-shaped section and are relatively heavy to be replaced. Moreover, the fuse and the beam segments are usually connected by bolts and it is time-consuming to replace the damaged fuse. For reducing the repair time and cost, a novel quickly replaceable coupling beam with buckling-restrained energy dissipaters is developed. The fuse of the proposed coupling beam consists of two chord members and bar-typed energy dissipaters placed at the corners of the fuse. In this way, the weight of the energy dissipater can be greatly reduced. The energy dissipaters and the chords are connected with hinge and it is convenient to take down the damaged energy dissipater. The influence of ratio of the length of coupling beam to the length of fuse on the seismic performance of the structure is also studied. The seismic performance of the coupled wall system with the proposed coupling beam is compared with the system with reinforced concrete coupling beams. Results indicated that the weight and post-earthquake repair cost of the proposed fuse can be reduced compared with the typical I-shaped fuse. With the increase of the ratio of the beam length to the fuse length, the interstory drift of the structure is reduced while the residual fuse chord rotation is increased.