Effects of Openings in Shear Wall on Seismic Response of Structures

Abstract

of reinforced concrete walls with different sizes of opening and reinforcing patterns around the opening. The test results indicated that the shear strength contributed by diagonal reinforcement around opening reached 40% of its yield strength, while the shear strength contributed by rectangular arrangement reached 20% of its yield strength. It was also concluded that shear capacity of section is not only affected by width of opening but also affected by depth of opening as well. Kim and Lee, 2003[3] proposed a method for the analysis of shear wall with openings using super elements to model the shear wall. Qaqish and Daqqaq, 2000[5] studied on effect of small openings on behavior of shear walls and the effect of opening size on behavior of coupled shear walls. Yanez, Park and Paulay, 1992[6] studied on seismic behavior of reinforced concrete walls with square openings of different size and arrangement under reversed cyclic loading. It was concluded that the stiffness of walls is dependent on the size of the openings not on their horizontal locations. It was suggested that the stiffness of walls without openings can be used for the stiffness of the walls with openings smaller than 10% of the wall area. In this study linear static analysis is performed on 6 story frame shear wall building keeping opening in shear wall (shell element is used to represent shear wall) with finite element software, ETABS[7] under earthquake loads in equivalent static method. The objective of this study is to know the effects of openings sizes and configurations in shear wall on stiffness as well as on seismic responses and explore the behavior of structural system so that a suitable configuration of openings in shear walls can be obtained.