Pseudo-Dynamic Test on Composite Frame with Steel-Reinforced Recycled Concrete Columns and Steel Beams

Pseudo-dynamic tests were conducted on a 2/5-scaled, three-story, two-span frame with steel-reinforced recycled concrete (SRRC) columns and steel beams. The El-Centro earthquake waves, Taft earthquake waves, and Lanzhou artificial earthquake waves were considered as the main loads to study the seismic behavior. The failure modes, displacement and acceleration time history curves, hysteretic characteristics, energy dissipation, stiffness degradation, and inter-story drift capacity of the composite frame were analyzed. Results showed that the composite frame did not show plastic deformation during the whole test process, and the steel beams and columns basically did not yield. Under the action of three seismic waves, the displacement response, acceleration response, and restoring force response of the composite frame were increased with seismic intensity, while the hysteretic curves and energy dissipation were different as the seismic wave changed. The seismic response of the composite frame was greatly affected by the spectral characteristics of the loading ground motion and the hysteretic energy mainly consisted of recoverable elastic deformation energy. Under the action of Taft wave with the input peak acceleration of 400 gal (rare earthquake), the stiffness degradation of composite frame was the largest, which reduced to 47% of the initial stiffness. This indicated that the composite frame had good energy dissipation performance in the elastic and elastic-plastic stages, and still possessed good rigidity after a rare earthquake, fully achieving the design purpose of “no collapse in major earthquake”.