Seismic performance of lightly reinforced structural walls for design purposes

Abstract

Lightly reinforced concrete walls are commonly found in low-to-moderate seismic regions such as Australia. While many theoretical analyses on lateral load-displacement of structural walls have been proposed and widely used, not many have been developed for lightly reinforced concrete walls. The lateral load-displacement behaviour and failure mechanism of lightly reinforced structural walls differ to those of heavily reinforced concrete walls, particularly in terms of tension stiffening effects, possible failure mechanisms and drift capacities. An analytical study on lightly reinforced rectangular concrete walls is presented in this paper. A parametric study was conducted to provide initial i..