Analytical Study on Seismic Behavior of Rectangular Shear Wall Connected to Floor Slabs

For construction of reinforced concrete buildings over four stories, structural walls are the predominant form for lateral load resistance under earthquakes. Current Indian seismic code for design of frame shear wall buildings (FSWB) do not explicitly consider the forces transferred from the floor slabs to the shear wall for seismic design. To assess stress concentration at the wall-slab junction region of the building and to observe the extent of possible damages in wall, slab and their junction region, nonlinear static analyses is carried out using ABAQUS program. Further, a wall-slab sub-assemblage is also analyzed to stimulate the observed behavior of the walls in the multistoried buildings and the behavior is compared with the isolated cantilever shear wall. The main intention of the study carried out is to study the behavior of the junction region between the shear wall and the floor slab and to develop a simplified but efficient analytical model to analyse a shear wall - floor slab junction. It is observed that the presence of floor slab at different levels along the height of slender shear wall tends to partition the wall into squat wall panels between two consecutive floors. Thus, an overall seismic design methodology for damage avoidance behavior of floor slabs in multistoried RC frame-wall building needs to be evolved.