RESEARCH ARTICLE


Shear and Flexural Stiffnesses of Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls Subjected to Cyclic Loading



T. O. Tang, R. K.L. Su*
Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, PRC.


Article Metrics

CrossRef Citations:
11
Total Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 1704
Abstract HTML Views: 2320
PDF Downloads: 11062
Total Views/Downloads: 15086
Unique Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 851
Abstract HTML Views: 1192
PDF Downloads: 7834
Total Views/Downloads: 9877



Creative Commons License
© 2014 Tang and Su;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, PRC; Tel: 852 2859 2648; Fax: 852 2559 5337; E-mail: klsu@hkucc.hku.hk


Abstract

Seismic analyses of concrete structures under maximum-considered earthquakes require the use of reduced stiffness accounting for cracks and degraded materials. Structural walls, different to other flexural dominated components, are sensitive to both shear and flexural stiffness degradations. Adoption of the gross shear stiffness for walls in seismic analysis prevails particularly for the design codes in the US. Yet available experimental results indicate that this could overstate the shear stiffness by more than double, which would hamper the actual predictions of building periods and shear load distributions among columns and walls. In addition, the deformation capacity could be drastically understated if the stipulated constant ductility capacity is adopted. This paper reviews the available simplified shear and flexural models, which stem from classical mechanics, empirical formulations and/or parametric studies, suitable for structural walls at the state-of-the-art. Reviews on the recommended flexural and shear stiffnesses by prominent design codes such as ACI318-11, Eurocode 8 and CSA are included. A database comprised of walls subjected to reverse-cyclic loads is formed to evaluate the performance of each model. It is found that there exist classical models that could outweigh overconservative codified values with comparable simplicity for practical uses.

Keywords: Ductility, effective stiffness, flexural stiffness, seismic, shear stiffness, shear stiffness, yielding.