Structural Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Slit Shear Walls

The construction of high rise buildings are tremendously increasing worldwide. An earthquake-resistant building is required to withstand earthquakes without collapsing and without incurring major damage. Shear walls are structural elements that resists earthquake loads and wind loads in medium to high rise buildings. They are efficient lateral load resisting systems but when ductility is concerned, they are not as efficient as a structural component. Solid shear walls are very rigid structures to resist the lateral load. As the stiffness of the wall increases, the lateral load resisting capacity increases. For small intensity earthquakes, shear walls behave as rigid structures, but when high intensity earthquakes occur, plastic hinge formation takes place at the base of the wall (i. e. only a fraction of height of the wall) and hence the ductility of the rest of the wall remains untapped. So the major problems of these structural elements are low ductility and low redundancy. The idea of introducing slits in the shear wall comes forward in this situation. Slits are introduced in the solid shear walls to act as seismic energy dissipators and convert them to flexible structures. The present study focuses on the performance of shear walls with various slit geometry by performing non-linear analysis. The work also emphasis to find the optimum slit size.