Deformation Limits for Structural Walls with Confined Boundaries

For accurate analytical assessment of performance and damage in reinforced concrete members, well-defined deformation limits at particular damage states are required. With advanced and computationally intensive finite element analyses, we establish deformation limits at yield and ultimate limit states for adequately confined rectangular reinforced concrete structural walls in terms of drift ratio, plastic rotation, and curvature. To investigate the deformation limits of structural walls, a parametric study on isolated cantilever wall models is performed. The primary variables of the parametric study are the shear-span-to-wall-length ratio, wall length, axial load ratio, normalized shear stress, the amount of horizontal web reinforcement, and the amount of longitudinal reinforcement at the confined boundary of structural wall models. Expressions and limit values are proposed for yield and ultimate deformation capacity of structural walls, based on the most influential parameters. The proposed equations are found to be promising when compared to results of experiments. [DOI: 10.1193/1.4000059]