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Earthquake Tip: Learning Earthquake Design and Construction

Reinforced concrete buildings in seismic regions often include vertical shear walls that run from the foundation up through the building. Shear walls help resist earthquake forces by transferring loads down to the foundation. Buildings with properly designed and constructed shear walls have performed well during past earthquakes. Shear walls provide strength and stiffness that reduces sway and damage during quakes. Their design and placement in buildings is important for seismic resistance.

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97 views13 pages

Earthquake Tip: Learning Earthquake Design and Construction

Reinforced concrete buildings in seismic regions often include vertical shear walls that run from the foundation up through the building. Shear walls help resist earthquake forces by transferring loads down to the foundation. Buildings with properly designed and constructed shear walls have performed well during past earthquakes. Shear walls provide strength and stiffness that reduces sway and damage during quakes. Their design and placement in buildings is important for seismic resistance.

Uploaded by

Chin Xue Kei
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Earthquake Tip

23

Learning
Earthquake Design
and
Construction

Why are Buildings with Shear Walls preferred in


Seismic Regions?
What is a Shear Wall Building
Reinforced concrete (RC) buildings often have
vertical plate-like RC walls called Shear Walls
(Figure 1) in addition to slabs, beams and
columns. These walls generally start at
foundation level and are continuous
throughout the building height. Their thickness
can be as low as 150mm, or as high as 400mm
in high rise buildings. Shear walls are usually
provided along both length and width of
buildings (Figure 1). Shear walls are like
vertically-oriented wide beams that carry
earthquake loads downwards to the
foundation.

buildings an excellent structural system for


earthquake resistance.

Advantages of Shear Walls in RC Buildings


Properly designed and detailed buildings with
shear walls have shown very good
performance in past earthquakes. The
overwhelming success of buildings with shear
walls in resisting strong earthquakes is
summarised in the quote:
We cannot afford to build concrete buildings
meant to resist severe earthquakes without
shear walls.
:: Mark Fintel, a noted consulting engineer in
USA

RC
Walls
Plan

RC
Foundation

Shear

Shear walls in high seismic regions require


special detailing. However, in past
earthquakes, even buildings with sufficient
amount of walls that were not specially
detailed for seismic performance (but had
enough well-distributed reinforcement) were
saved from collapse. Shear wall buildings are a
popular choice in many earthquake prone
countries, like Chile, New Zealand and USA.
Shear walls are easy to construct, because
reinforcement detailing of walls is relatively
straight-forward and therefore easily
implemented at site. Shear walls are efficient,
both in terms of construction cost and
effectiveness in minimizing earthquake
damage in structural and non-

Wall

structural elements (like glass windows and


building contents).

Figure 1: Reinforced concrete shear walls in

Architectural Aspects of Shear Walls

Most RC buildings with shear walls also have


columns; these columns primarily carry gravity
loads (i.e., those due to self-weight and
contents of building). Shear walls provide large
strength and stiffness to buildings in the
direction of their orientation, which
significantly reduces lateral sway of the
building and thereby reduces damage to
structure and its contents. Since shear walls
carry large horizontal earthquake forces, the
overturning effects on them are large. Thus,
design of their foundations requires special
attention. Shear walls should be provided
along preferably both length and width.
However, if they are provided along only one
direction, a proper grid of beams and columns
in the vertical plane (called a momentresistant frame) must be provided along the
other direction to resist strong earthquake
effects.
Door or window openings can be provided in
shear walls, but their size must be small to
ensure least interruption to force flow through
walls. Moreover, openings should be
symmetrically located. Special design checks
are required to ensure that the net cross45

sectional area of a wall at an opening is


sufficient to carry the horizontal earthquake
force.
Shear walls in buildings must be symmetrically
located in plan to reduce ill-effects of twist in
buildings (Figure 2). They could be placed
symmetrically along one or both directions in
plan. Shear walls are more effective when
located along exterior perimeter of the building
such a layout increases resistance of the
building to twisting.

Unsymmetric location of shear walls not desirable


Symmetry of building in plan about both axes

Symmetric location of shear walls along the perimeter of the


building is desirable

Figure 2: Shear walls must be symmetric in plan


layout twist in buildings can be avoided.

IITK-BMTPC Earthquake Tip 23


Why are Buildings with Shear Walls preferred in Seismic Regions?

page 2

Ductile Design of Shear Walls


increased. RC walls with boundary elements have
Just like reinforced concrete (RC) beams and
substantially higher bending strength and horizontal
columns, RC shear walls also perform much better if
shear force carrying capacity, and are therefore less
designed to be ductile. Overall geometric proportions
susceptible to earthquake damage than walls without
of the wall, types and amount of reinforcement, and
boundary elements.
connection with remaining elements in the building

help in im proving the ductility of walls. The Indian

Standard Ductile Detailing Code for RC members


Tension

Co mpression

(IS:13920-1993) provides special design guidelines for

ductile detailing of shear walls.

Overall Geometry of Walls: Shear walls are

Closely spaced confining

oblong in cross-section, i.e., one dimension of the

reinforcement in boundary

cross-sect ion is much larger than the other. While

elements

rectangular cross- section is common, L- and U-shaped

Proper anchoring of vertical

sections are also used (Figure 3). Thin- walled hollow

reinforce ment into foundation

RC shafts around the elevator core of buildings also

act as shear walls, and should be taken advantage of to

resist earthquake forces.

(a)

Rectangular
C-Shaped
L-Shaped

RC Hollow
Core around
Elevators

Figure 3: Shear walls in RC Buildings different


geometries are possible.

Reinforcement Bars in RC Walls: Steel


reinforcing bars are to be provided in walls in
regularly spaced vertical and horizontal grids
(Figure 4a). The vertical and horizontal
reinforcement in the wall can be placed in one or
two parallel layers called curtains. Horizontal
reinforcement needs to be anchored at the ends
of walls. The minimum area of reinforcing steel
to be provided is 0.0025 times the crosssectional area, along each of the horizontal and
vertical directions. This vertical reinforcement

should be distributed uniformly across the wall


cross-section.

Boundary Elements: Under the large overturning


effects caused by horizontal earthquake forces,
edges of shear walls experience high
compressive and tensile stresses. To ensure that
shear walls behave in a ductile way, concrete in
the wall end regions must be reinforced in a
special manner to sustain these load reversals
without loosing strength (Figure 4b). End
regions of a wall with increased confinement are
called boundary elements. This special
confining transverse reinforcement in boundary
elements is similar to that provided in columns
of RC frames (See IITK-BMTPC Earthquake Tip
19). Sometimes, the thickness of the shear wall
in these boundary elements is also
Boundary

Boundary

with increased thickness

(b)
Figure 4: Layout of main reinforcement in shear
walls as per IS:13920-1993 detailing is the key to
good seismic performance.

Related

Earthquake Tip

Tip 6: How Architectural Features Affect Buildings


During Earthquakes?
Tip 19: How do Columns in RC Buildings Resist
Earthquakes?

Boundary Elements

Element without increased thickness

Boundary Elements

Confining reinforcement in
Anchoring of wall
boundary elements:
reinforcement in
135 hooks, closely spaced ties
boundary element

Reading Material

Element

IS 13920, (1993), Indian Standard Code of Practice for


Ductile Detailing of Reinforced Concrete Structures
Subjected to Seismic Forces, Bureau of Indian Standards,
New Delhi
Paulay,T., and Priestley,M.J.N., (1992), Seismic Design of
Reinforced Concrete and Masonry Buildings, John Wiley &
Sons, USA

Authored by:
C.V.R.Murty
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Kanpur,
India
Sponsored by:
Building Materials and Technology Promotion
Council, New Delhi, India
This release is a property of IIT Kanpur and BMTPC New Delhi.
It may be reproduced without changing its contents and with
due acknowledgement. Suggestions/comments may be sent to:
nicee@iitk.ac.in Visit www.nicee.org or www.bmtpc.org, to see
previous IITK-BMTPC Earthquake Tips.

46

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