Finite Element Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls with a Crack under Cyclic Loading

The present paper investigates the nonlinear behavior of reinforced concrete shear walls with a crank based on a finite element analysis. The loading type is a horizontal cyclic one such as earthquake loads. Experiments of the shear walls with and without cranks, performed previously to see flow the behavior changes depending on the crank, are compared with the results obtained from the finite element analysis. The finite element analysis is based on an isoparametric degenerated shell formulation. The nonlinear constitutive equations fur concrete are modeled adopting the formulation based on a concept of Ring Typed-Lattice Model. The experiments indicate that the shear walls with a crank have low stiffness and relatively low carrying capacity compared with an ordinary plane shear wall without cranks and that they are more ductile, and the tendency is a1so confirmed based on the finite element analysis. Moreover, a good agreement between the experiments and analyses is obtained, accordingly, it is confined that the present numerical analysis scheme based on the Lattice Model is a powerful one to evaluate the behavior of reinforced concrete shear walls with cranks and without cranks.