PSI - Issue 78

Emanuele Brunesi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 161–168

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determine cohesion, friction coefficient and bond strength of mortar). As such, this Section briefly reports two examples of auxiliary testing, as can be gathered from Figure 9 and Figure 10, the former of which shows a schematic of the test setup used for cyclic asymmetric tensile tests of three-way wall panel connections together with an example of force-displacement response curves. The latter (i.e. Figure 10), instead, shows a schematic of test setup designed for cyclic friction characterisation testing of fabric felt material used in these structures as the interface between precast slab and wall panels and an example of friction coefficient versus imposed displacement response curves.

Fig. 9. Setup for asymmetric cyclic tensile testing of three-way wall panel connections and example of force-displacement response curves.

Fig. 10. Setup for cyclic friction characterisation testing of felt material and example of friction coefficient-imposed displacement curves.

Somewhat interestingly, monotonic and cyclic response curves of the five three-way panel connections tested (and the counterpart damage patterns) revealed that the observed flexural failure mechanism of the steel connectors is very stable and aligns very well with that mobilised by the full-scale building tests, in terms of both force and displacement capacity. Cyclic-symmetric tests on fabric felt material, in conjunction with triplet-monotonic tests, instead, allowed not only an estimate of the shear force transferred, in actual buildings of this kind, between the slabs and the precast walls underneath them, but also a likely force-displacement relationship that may be employed in numerical modelling efforts. 5. Closing remarks Three full-scale building specimens were designed, detailed and built/assembled to be representative of wall-slab wall structures, a building typology that is a very common form of housing in the Netherlands. A one-storey two-bay specimen, composed of walls and slabs cast in one stage to emulate the tunnel-built construction technique commonly used for Dutch terraced houses, was tested cyclically, in pseudo-static fashion, under a bi-directional loading protocol, revealing that out-of-plane and in-plane rocking of walls was the dominating response mode in the longitudinal/weak and transverse/strong building directions, respectively. The other two specimens, two two-storey one-bay precast wall slab-wall structures, were also tested – dynamically and cyclically – to evaluate the seismic performance of buildings