Investigation of the location of a shear wall in an rcc medium-rise building

Abstract

Shear wall systems are among the most commonly used lateral-load resisting systems in high-rise buildings. Shear walls have very high in-plane stiffness and strength, which can be used to simultaneously resist large horizontal loads and support gravity loads, making them quite advantageous in many structural engineering applications. Many references are available concerning the design and analysis of a shear wall. However, the decision about the location of a shear wall in a multistorey building is not much discussed in any of them. In this paper, therefore, the main focus is to determine the shear wall location in a multistorey building based on its elastic and elastoplastic behaviors. An earthquake load is calculated and applied to a building of fifteen stories located in zone IV. Elastic and elastoplastic analyses were performed using both STAAD PRO 2004 and SAP2000 (2006) software packages. Shear forces, bending moment, and storey drift were computed in both cases and the location of a shear wall was established based upon the above computations.