Crack Damages in Exterior Wall Structures of Korean High-Rise Apartment Buildings Based on Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis

비선형 유한요소해석 기반 국내 고층아파트 외벽구조의 균열손상 특성 분석

Recently, in newly constructed apartment buildings, the exterior wall structures have been characterized by thinness, having various openings, and a significantly low reinforcement ratio. In this study, a nonlinear finite element analysis was performed to investigate the crack damage characteristics of the exterior wall structure. The limited analysis models for a 10-story exterior wall were constructed based on the prototype apartment building, and nonlinear static analysis (push-over analysis) was performed. Based on the finite element (FE) analysis model, the parametric study was conducted to investigate the effects of various design parameters on the strength and crack width of the exterior walls. As the parameters, the vertical reinforcement ratio and horizontal reinforcement ratio of the wall, as well as the uniformly distributed longitudinal reinforcement ratio and shear reinforcement ratio of the connection beam, were addressed. The analysis results showed that the strength and deformation capacity of the prototype exterior walls were limited by the failure of the connection beam prior to the flexural yielding of the walls. Thus, the increase of wall reinforcement limitedly affected the failure modes, peak strengths, and crack damages. On the other hand, when the reinforcement ratio of the connection beams was increased, the peak strength was increased due to the increase in the load-carrying capacity of the connection beams. Further, the crack damage index decreased as the reinforcement ratio of the connection beam increased. In particular, it was more effective to increase the uniformly distributed longitudinal reinforcement ratio in the connection beams to decrease the crack damage of the coupling beams, regardless of the type of the prototype exterior walls.