Effect of Base Opening in Reinforced Concrete Shear Wall

Abstract

Shear walls (SW) are proven to be efficient in resisting and transferring the lateral/seismic loads in earthquake prone areas. In High raised buildings it is customary to provide basement parking also known as stilt parking which leads to the provision of openings at the base of shear walls. Therefore it is very important to study the logical positioning of the base opening and the behaviour of structure. This paper presents the study on SW with base openings, focusing on comparing the load carrying capacity with respect to that of solid SW. Finite element package in ANSYS software is used for modeling and analysis. A non-linear static analysis is performed for two parameters – a) location of the base opening and b) the percentage area of base opening for the SW. It is observed in the case of SW with symmetric base opening, the eccentric base opening leads to less load carrying capacity comparatively. Also it is found that the load carrying capacity decreases abruptly for the shear wall with base opening area greater than 50% of solid shear wall.

Keywords: ANSYS, Base opening, Non Linear Static Analysis, Seismic load, shear wall