The Effect of Link Beam's Eccentricity on Behavior and Capacity of RC Shear Walls for Building Dual Systems

This paper briefly discusses the effect of link beam’s eccentricity with respect to the inplane center line of coupled shear walls, on their behavior and capacity which is important for analysis and design. This investigation concen-trates on the nonlinear behavior of RC coupled shear walls which are selected from an eight story building having structural seismic dual system. This building was analyzed and designed according to the Iranian code of practice for seismic design (IS-2800), utilizing ETABS software and ACI-318 code of practice. Coupled shear wall was modeled according to the ABAQUS computing program with various ratio of eccentricity. Nonlinear static and dynamic analysis of this model is carried out for various ratios of eccentricities. A total of three earthquake records (Bam Eq., Roudbar Eq. and Tabas Eq.) were used in nonlinear dynamic analysis. Results indicate that due to the eccentricity of link beam, the out of plane bending moment, out of plane shear force exerted to the shear wall increase by increasing the eccentricity ratios; and the variation of their maximum values corresponding to the eccentricity ratios have regular pattern. On the other hand, the inplane shear force for all models decreases about 20 to 30 percent. The out of plane displacement of shear walls were considerably ignorable.