STUDY OF FAILURE AND DEFORMATION CHARACTERISTICS OF SOLID SHEAR WALL WITH DIAGONAL STIFFENERS

Shear walls are the structural member provided in high rise buildings spanning from foundation to top of the building. These walls serve a dual purpose as seismic and wind resistant element, and as a part of structural enclosure. Sometimes openings are provided in it for the functional requirement or for building services purpose. Strength of these walls reduces due to openings provided in it. To recover this strength reduction, different codes throughout the world have suggested various arrangements of additional reinforcement around openings. As the main function of these walls is to resist seismic forces; these walls act as a barrier at the time of seismic activity. However, the well-designed shear walls may undergo severe damages due to a strong earthquake. Therefore it necessary to strengthen the structures with the help of shear walls without incurring much more cost. Shear walls can be made stronger with the addition of steel area in the form of stiffeners instead of increasing reinforcement ratio. In this study arrangement of concealed stiffeners is proposed to improve the behaviour of solid shear walls. Experiments were conducted on six shear wall models with conventional reinforcement and shear walls with conventional reinforcement along with concealed stiffeners. A significant improvement is recorded with the addition of concealed stiffeners in shear wall cross-section. The main focus of this study is to know deformation capacity, crack pattern, failure mode and strain character in the solid shear wall and improvement in behaviour due to the addition of stiffeners