Study On Short-span Coupling Beams With Integrated Diagonally Reinforced Detailing

Coupling beams, functioning as the ligament of transferring loads between single shear walls, are important elements in coupled walls. At present, the investigation on coupling beams has been often carried out but its attention is always put onto the limited experiments. Therefore, it's of vital importance in the engineering aspect to simulate the coupling beams based on finite element method (FEM for short).As the research work had showed, if the traditional method about the steel layout and the shear resistance in coupling beams was used in designing seismic ones, the pre-appearance of shear fail in coupling beams could not avoid, thus leading to not meeting the well ductility and well energy dissipating capacity under severe earthquake. It was known that coupling beams with integrated diagonally reinforced detailing are characterized by effectively improving the ductility and energy dissipating capacity under earthquake. So in this thesis, a mathematic model base on FEM was successfully built by means of a kind of finite element software called ANSYS, to simulate coupling beams with integrated diagonally reinforced detailing. The calculation results were compared with the experimental ones to verify the model. Furthermore, the influence of span-to-depth ratio and reinforcement ratio on coupling beams' properties was analyzed. The results indicated that the calculated values about limit load, limit displacement, steel's stress fitted well with the experimental ones including the cracking mode which demonstrated the finite element model through ANSYS was feasible and reliable to simulate coupling beams. Then the yielding displacement, limit displacement and displacement-ductility ratio of coupling beams with integrated diagonally reinforced detailing increased while yielding load and limit load decreased with the increasing span-to-depth ratio. As reinforcement ratio of longitudinal steels increased, the yield displacement, yielding load and limit load ascended but the displacement-ductility ratio declined. Coupling beams' yielding load and limit load also was enhanced when more diagonally reinforcement was included.