**Numerical Study on Hysteretic Behaviour of Horizontal-Connection and Energy-Dissipation Structures Developed for Prefabricated Shear Walls**

#### **Limeng Zhu 1,2, Lingmao Kong 1 and Chunwei Zhang 1,2,\***


Received: 3 January 2020; Accepted: 7 February 2020; Published: 12 February 2020

**Featured Application: This developed "double-step" horizontal-connection and energy-dissipation structure could be used for prefabricated structures such as shear walls and replaceable coupling beams. In its first step, it weakly connects two adjacent shear walls and mainly dissipates the input energy. In its second step, it could strongly integrate two separate adjacent shear walls into one unit to obtain one stronger structure member to resist the collapse of the structural system.**

**Abstract:** This study proposed a developed horizontal-connection and energy-dissipation structure (HES), which could be employed for horizontal connection of prefabricated shear wall structural system. The HES consists of an external replaceable energy dissipation (ED) zone mainly for energy dissipation and an internal stiffness lifting (SL) zone for enhancing the load-bearing capacity. By the predicted displacement threshold control device, the ED zone made in bolted low-yielding steel plates could firstly dissipate the energy and can be replaced after damage, the SL zone could delay the load-bearing and the load-displacement curves of the HES would exhibit "double-step" characteristics. Detailed finite element models are established and validated in software ABAQUS. parametric analysis including aspect ratio, the shape of the steel plate in the ED zone and the displacement threshold in the SL zone, is conducted. It is found that the HES depicts high energy dissipation ability and its bearing capacity could be obtained again after the yielding of the ED zone. The optimized X-shaped steel plate in the ED zone exhibit better performance. The "double-step" design of the HES is a potential way of improving the seismic and anti-collapsing performance of prefabricated shear wall structures against large and super-large earthquakes.

**Keywords:** energy dissipation; "double-step" characteristics; stiffness lifting; seismic performance; horizontal connection; prefabricated shear wall structural systems
