## 1 Introduction  
Conventional cast-in-place concrete structural shear walls have been widely investigated as lateral-force resisting members in structural systems, which are widely applied for buildings in seismic areas. Other types of lateral force resistance and energy dissipation systems have been equally widely investigated and applied. For example, cold-formed steel systems have been successfully developed in low-to-mid-rise buildings based on being light weight, easily constructed, and having excellent seismic performance [1; 2; 3]. Generally, monolithic shear walls have greater stiffness and strength than other structural members, which control the overall lateral displacements of buildings effectively. However, under major earthquakes, monolithic shear walls inevitably undergo the crushing of concrete and yielding of reinforcing bars, leading to weak post-earthquake repairability. To improve the seismic performance and resilience of structures, rocking structures have recently been proposed and investigated by numerous structural scholars [4; 5; 6; 7]. They have been applied in recent years on seismic strengthening construction projects of real structures as well, such as a five-story reinforced concrete (RC) frame building located in a high-seismicity area in China [8] and the G3 Building of the Tokyo Institute of Technology [9]. Among the different rocking systems, precast rocking walls, usually combined with unbonded post-tension (UPT) technology, can provide adequate lateral stiffness and self-centering capacity, which are becoming an increasingly important research field for novel lateral-force-resisting members. Studies on prestressed precast rocking walls initiated in the PRESSS Research Program [10] proposed a common form of precast concrete rocking wall structures based on UPT, and a typical trilinear model of the rocking walls without additional energy dissipaters was present. Shaking table tests [4] on a five-story frame-rocking wall structure in the PRESSS Research Program showed little damage in the rocking walls. The studies conducted by [PERSON] [11; 12] and [PERSON] [13] indicated that the prestressing tendons made a major contribution to the self-centering capacities of the rocking walls before yielding, but had little effect on the energy dissipation capacities of the walls. The seismic force was always transmitted to the structure in the form of energy, and the traditional structure tended to dissipate the seismic energy through irreparable structural damage. If the structure was fitted with a specialized seismic energy dissipation device, i.e., an energy dissipater, the structure could effectively concentrate the damage caused by the earthquake and accelerate the repair speed of the structure in post-quake period. Therefore, energy dissipaters were utilized to improve the rocking wall systems. Internal mild steel reinforcement has been extensively investigated as an energy dissipater in rocking wall structures [14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19] and is usually used in wall-foundation joints. The installation of mild steel reinforcement noticeably improved the energy dissipation capacity of the rocking walls. However, this kind of energy dissipater inside the wall panel was difficult to replace after an earthquake, which obviously increased the rehabilitation costs. Furthermore, [PERSON] [15] found that the concrete around the internal mild steel reinforcements in the abovementioned system tended to deteriorate due to stress concentration. Therefore, it is more practical to develop external energy dissipaters to improve the seismic resistance and post-earthquake repairability of rocking wall structures. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [20; 21] applied U-shaped flexural plate connectors to a jointed rocking wall system and proposed a simplified analysis method. [PERSON] [22] investigated the behavior of several types of vertical joint connectors between rocking walls and concluded that oval-shaped flexural plates (O-connectors) had excellent hysteresis properties.