Seismic behaviour of RC walls: an attempt to reduce reinforcement congestion

The paper is concerned with an experimental investigation of the behaviour of two types of structural concrete walls, which are subjected to static monotonic and cyclic loading and have the same geometry and vertical reinforcement details but differ in the horizontal reinforcement arrangement – the latter designed either in compliance with the earthquake-resistant design clauses of the current European codes or in accordance with the method of the compressive force path. It is intended to verify the findings of previous analytical work on the subject which has shown that adopting the latter method yields significantly more efficient design solutions without compromising the code performance requirements.