Nonlinear Dynamic Analysis Of Coupled Shear Walls

Coupled shear walls are frequently used in high rise buildings toovercome lateral loads resulting from wind and earthquakes. Duringearthquakes, structures are exposed to cracking and to some extentyielding of structural members leading to necessity the nonlinear structural analysis.The aim of this research is to develop a nonlinear finite element model and incorporate such model into a computer program to solve a plane reinforced concrete structures such as shear walls, deep beams,plane frames, .... etc, due to different dynamic or static loads. The computer program has many capabilities to calculates the response of the principal’ stresses, principal strains, lateral displacement at any joint, the case of element ((no crack or number of crack) in case of tension, (elastic, plastic, elastic unloading, plastic unloading) in case of compression).Steel reinforcement is represented by nonlinear bar elements. Theverification of the program is made based on different experientialpublished researches where good agreement is observed when comparingthe results of proposed models to that of previous experimental resultsfound in literature. Finally, the computer program is used to investigatethe behavior of coupled shear walls under seismic loads. The used modelreflects the actual size for both types of elements (concrete and steelelements) for which the mesh used is O.2m*O.2m to represent the studiedcoupled shear walls. A parametric study is made to observe the effect ofnumerous parameters on the behavior of coupled shear walls. Severalparameters such as change the depth of coupling beam, amount of steelratio, floor mass are studied. Conclusions are made about the effect ofsuch design parameters on the behavior of RC coupled shear walls as aguide for practitioner engineers..