Seismic behaviour of wood-concrete frame shearwall system and comparison with code provisions

Constructive systems adopting mixed shear walls made of a wood frame and fibrous or cementitious sheets are largely spread nowadays, particularly for prefabricated buildings. The use of gypsum boards as bracing panels is already widespread, but also fiber cement or reinforced concrete slabs can be used. The choice of such different materials allows to reach excellent thermal and acoustic insulation performance. Perhaps the demonstration of their sound structural behavior, especially towards the earthquake resistance is still to be given, and their ductility and dissipative capacities still need to be fully assessed even if some experimental tests have already been conducted. Moreover these particular constructive systems are yet not accounted in the building codes (Eurocode 5, EN 1995 [1] and Eurocode 8, EN 1998 [2]) and no guidelines are given for their seismic design in order to assure an adequate overstrength of the bracing panels and the adequacy of the fixing system of the panels to the wooden frames.