Determination of Behavior of Coupled Shear Walls Subjected to Horizontal Forces through Nonlinear Static Methods

Abstract

Coupled shear walls are one of the systems commonly used in medium and highrise structures to resist lateral forces. Yet these systems should not collapse or be induced severe damage during earthquake actions. For this reason, coupled shear walls must have high strength, high ductility, high energy absorption capacity and high shear stiffness to limit lateral deformations. The recent advances in structural engineering have increased the interest in performance based design. In the study herein, hence, the performance based design of a coupled shear wall system has been carried out. The design has later been checked against nonlinear time history analysis and the design performed has been confirmed to be quite safe. In the second stage of the study, the horizontal capacity of couple shear walls is predicted by the pushover analyses. Though these procedures have been used for different types of structures, they have not been employed for coupled shear walls. The procedures employed are conventional pushover (deformation and forced based), force based adaptive pushover, and deformation based adaptive pushover. The capacity curves obtained through these procedures have been compared with the one determined through Incremental Dynamic Analysis. The evaluation shows that it is almost unlikely to determine the capacity curve of coupled shear walls by the nonlinear static analyses. Nonetheless, the displacement based adaptive pushover analyses has been able to predict the base shear capacity and capture the displacement profile of the system up to a certain level in the nonlinear region.