Abstract
Modern construction of high-rise and tall buildings depends on coupled shear walls system to resist the lateral loads induced by wind and earthquake hazards. The lateral behavior of this system depends on the structural behavior of its components including coupling beams and shear walls. Although many research studies in the literature investigated coupling beams and shear walls, these studies stopped short of investigating the coupled shear walls as a system. Therefore, in this research, the effect of the coupling beam parameters on the nonlinear behavior of the coupled shear walls system was investigated. The full behavior of a 10-story coupled shear wall system was modeled using a series of finite element analyses. The analysis comprised of testing several coupling beam parameters to capture the effect of each parameter on system response including load-deflection behavior, coupling ratio, crack pattern, and failure mechanism. The results indicated that a span-to-depth ratio equal to two is a turning point for the coupling beam behavior. Specifically, the behavior is dominated by ordinary flexure for a ratio of more than two and deep beam behavior for a ratio of less than two. This study showed that the coupling beam width does not have a significant effect on the coupled shear wall response. Additionally, it was concluded that the excessive coupling beam diagonal reinforcement could significantly affect the coupled shear walls behavior and therefore an upper limit for the diagonal reinforcement was provided. Moreover, limitations on the longitudinal and diagonal reinforcement and stirrups are presented herein. The analysis results presented in this paper can provide guidance for practitioners in terms of making decisions about the coupling ratio of the coupled shear walls.
Highlights
Coupled Shear Walls (CSWs) enable two walls, or more, to act as one wall with a certain level of efficiency, depending on how much coupling is provided by the Coupling Beam (CB) [1]
Any increase in the CB span-to-depth ratio will be followed by an increase in the CSWs system shear and moment capacity
This jump could be interpreted as a point of change in the system stiffness due to the significant increase in the shear capacity of the CB
Summary
Coupled Shear Walls (CSWs) enable two walls, or more, to act as one wall with a certain level of efficiency, depending on how much coupling is provided by the Coupling Beam (CB) [1]. CBs are usually provided on each floor to connect the walls and efficiently control their behavior These beams limit the axial deformation in each wall in terms of tension in one wall and compression in the other coupled wall. Shear walls are used as a primary lateral load resisting system in high-rise buildings, but sometimes they are designed and constructed with two or several walls connected with a deep short beam to accommodate openings for windows or doors This combination of walls and CBs is termed as a pier-spandrel system. Walls connected at different levels with CBs act as a frame where the piers represent columns and the spandrels represent beams Those spandrels are responsible for coupling the lateral load resistance of adjacent walls. A Reinforced Concrete (RC) CB with a certain reinforcement (RFT) layout can be used as a mean of increasing the wall resistance and provide better energy dissipation
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