Assessment of plastic hinge in RC structures with and without shear walls applying pushover analysis

Abstract

This paper gives a brief presentation about different types of analysis, plastic hinge, moment-resisting frames (MRFs) and shear walls (SWs) in reinforced concrete (RC) Structures. ETABS computer software is employed to model and analyse the structures applying the pushover. The performances of the modelled structures are also evaluated considering different parameters such as the number of stories, spans length, shear walls, reinforcement yield strength and characteristic strength of concrete. The study includes two cases, which are moment-resisting frames with and without shear walls (i.e. MRFs and MRF-SWs, respectively). Each case covers low-, mid- and high-rise buildings. In this regard, a comparative study has been performed for the results obtained from all models. It was observed that the stiffness of MRFs compared to MRF-SWs was less and also the stiffness of low-rise frames was higher than that of mid-rise and high-rise frames. Technically this means that a low-rise building is stiffer than a mid-rise building and a mid-rise building is stiffer than a high-rise building. Additionally, when the span length increases, the stiffness of the building decreases. Therefore, it can be concluded that the span length is inversely proportional to the stiffness. Finally, all stiffness values were calculated taking into consideration the displacement and base shear at the first hinge formation on the pushover curve of each model.