Experimental Study and Numerical Simulation of the Reinforced Concrete Walls with Different Stirrup in the Boundary Element

Reinforced concrete shear wall is one of the main lateral resistance members in tall buildings. A further understanding of shear walls is believed important to the seismic design. To day, it is recognized that boundary elements will contribute to the seismic behavior of shear walls, though the extent still remains vague and evidence is seldom given by relative experiment. Further-more, the nonlinear capacity evaluation method of shear walls is also a difficulty, especially considering the boundary elements. This paper aims to extend the relevant existing studies with the following two programs: (1) The experimental study of shear walls with different stirrup ratios in boundary areas; (2) A numerical simulation study of the three specimens. A finite element program SAPCAD is applied to simulate the seismic behavior of the shear wall specimens with different boundary condition. The experimental study and the numerical simulation in this paper indicate that: (I) A properly distributed boundary element may be helpful to avoid local crush and brittle failure; (2) The lateral load-carrying capacity could be influenced by stirrup bars; (3) The cyclical load simulation results drawn by SAPCAD agree with the test results. And some of the stirrup effect could be evaluated by this kind of simulation.