Response of reinforced concrete shear walls with various detailing of reinforcement

Shear walls are critical lateral load resisting elements in buildings. These walls exhibit complex failure modes as they are subject to a combination of vertical compression and in-plane shear loads and are vulnerable to shear dominated failure depending up on their aspect ratio, vertical load to compressive strength ratio and reinforcement ratio. As the compression capacity of reinforced concrete shear walls is achieved with no regard to the steel area, it is not uncommon to have a combination of very high strength concrete and minimum required percentage of steel in the walls with relatively high compression and low in-plane shear load. Walls of such design exhibited brittle failure in the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, which prompted the AS3600 (2018) revision to make significant changes to the ductility and detailing provisions of structural walls. In this research shear walls with a range of compressive strength of concrete, percentages and detailing (single layer - double layer) of steel have been analysed through a non-linear finite element modelling method. It has been discovered that the shear walls with single layer and double layer reinforcement do not differ significantly in either their lateral in-plane load capacity nor in their ductility. Walls made from very high compressive strength (with associated higher tensile strength) concretes are shown to exhibit nonductile failure mode.