Pendulum Impact Test on a Reinforced Concrete Wall

Abstract

A large scale instrumented impact experiment was conducted on a fixed base reinforced concrete wall in view of the lack of such experiment in the literature. A 1.5 m tall, 3 m wide and 0.23 m thick reinforced concrete wall fully fixed to the ground was used as the specimen. Two steel impactors with mass of 280 and 435 kg were released from controlled heights ranging from 0.2 to 1.4 m to strike the top of the wall. The experiment was carried out in a fully controlled laboratory environment with the impact conditions and structural behavior of the specimen recorded. Over 60 pieces of instruments were employed to achieve that. In this paper, the details of the test setup, specimen, impactors and instrumentation will be presented, alongside with some of the recorded results. A key observation from the results is that the structural response of the target wall can vary significantly when the impact energy was kept the same across different impactor mass. It was also found that the maximum contact force applied to the structure is not representative of the structure’s actual impact response.