Seismic Behavior of RC Dual Ductility Mode Shear Walls

Abstract eng:
Shear walls are among the most common lateral load resisting systems in medium height buildings. This is due, mostly, to their ability in providing the required level of lateral stiffness and strength for the structure. However, if ductility is the major concern, shear walls are not considered as efficient structural component. The fact is, in a tall shear wall, plastic hinge formation happens only in a fraction of the height of the wall and ductility resources of the rest of the wall remains, mostly, untapped. The experiences with coupled shear walls have shown the potential of dispersion of inelastic behavior over the height of the wall that causes a more desirable ductile behavior and crack pattern for the system. Intuitively, the same concept can be extended to the shear walls with openings. In such cases, both flexural and shear ductility capacity of the system over the height of the wall can be efficiently used to provide us with a dual ductility mode shear wall. In this study a series of inelastic dynamic analysis on coupled shear walls have been carried out to show the potential of dual ductility mode of behavior in responses of such systems subjected to seismic loads. The analysis is based on the equivalent frame approach for modeling the shear walls. The results show much higher performances for dual ductility mode coupled shear walls in comparison with the ordinary ones. Improvement in the behavior of coupled shear wall is quite substantial in deformational and damage aspects of the system. Furthermore, due to damage dispersion and mitigation along the height of the wall, the base shear and base moment of these shear walls reduced.

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