Reinforced Concrete Interior Wide-Band Beam-Column Connections Subjected to Lateral Earthquake Loading

Experimental results from quasistatic cyclic lateral load tests on two half-scale reinforced concrete interior wide-band beam-column subassemblages are presented. The first connection is detailed without any special provision for seismicity, and the second connection is similarly detailed except for a small number of modifications that are shown to improve the performance of the connection. The second connection includes a unique detailing strategy involving the debonding of reinforcing bars to prevent the formation of undesirable torsion and shear cracks. This connection is shown to perform very well up to the maximum applied 4% nominal drift; hence, a recommendation is made that limits on beam width in regions of high seismicity could be removed from current design codes if the unique detailing strategy is used.