Seismic Performance of Reinforced Concrete Structures Using Shear Walls

Abstract

With the rapid growth of urban population and economic activities in several regions around the world, the demand of the building has increased in the past few decades. Scarcity of land makes the horizontal development restricted. Hence most of the designers for the construction use vertical development. One of the major obstacles for vertical development of building is lateral loads due to wind and earthquake. India is basically divided into four seismic Zones –II, III, IV, V. Zone II ,III may be considered as little and moderately prone to earthquake whereas IV and  V may be considered as severe and extreme severe zones. Hence the structures in zones IV, V has to be made earthquake resistant. The structure can be made earthquake resistant by the provision of a shear wall in the structure. In the present work, a 10 and 15 storied structures situated in seismic zone V were analyzed in ETABS using Seismic Coefficient method and the parameters such as lateral storey displacements, storey drifts, Bending moments were studied. The structures are then equipped with shear walls of different configurations such as L, Core, rectangle and channel shape and observed the efficient configuration for the effective reduction in seismic response. It has been observed that the  lateral roof displacements reduced largely to an amount of 84%, lateral storey drifts up to 85% and bending moments in columns up to 88% in a 10 storied structure and the maximum reduction in seismic response is observed in structure provided with L shape shear wall at the four corners of the building.