Study And Finite Element Analysis On Seismic Shear Behavior Of Reinforced Concrete Walls

Reinforce concrete shearwalls are critical members in modern high-rise buildings. In the seismic structural wall systems, Frame-wall systems and the frame-core systems, walls are important for ensuring lateral stiffness, contributing to basic earthquake resistance and dissipating energy. In order to ensure the ductile behavior of walls in structures designed according to ductility concept, shear failure should be excluded before walls response nonelastically in the great ground shaking as expected. Therefore, in the seismic design of ductile wall systems, it is critical to definite appropriate formula calculating seismic shear capacity. Until recently, without any tests on the seismic shear behavior of walls or refer to any relevant test abroad, the formula calculating seismic shear capacity of walls in Chinese Code GB 50010-2002 are only developed based on the tests of shear behaviors of nonseismic walls, being judged by professionals. In order to improve the weakness in the shear design of critical members resisting earthquakes——shearwalls, the Civil Engineering College of Chongqing University undertake the project of investigation on shear behaviors of seismic shearwalls in the 6th batch of research subject on Code. This thesis is part of the project.The thesis begins with a comprehensive overview of the modeling of shear behaviors and code shear design provisions of reinforced concrete structural elements in different countries, which may be useful for the further investigation about the shear behavior of reinforced concrete structural members including shearwalls.According to the subject, the thesis gives a review over the experimental and analytical research work in time sequence, which may be useful for further investigations.A program based on the Modified Compression Field Theory for nonlinear finite element analysis of reinforced concrete members,which was developed by Professor Vecchio's research group at the University of Toronto in Canada, is for the first time introduced and tested. It is found that VecTor2 should work effectively as analysis aids, for predicting and controlling in the stage of specimens designing before tests, for modeling and additional analyzing after tests. At the end of the thesis, comparisons on the test results and the values predicted by different codes (not considering degree of reliability) are carried out to arrive at some orientational point of view.