Plasticity Approach to HSC Shear Wall Design

The paper describes a simple theory for determining the ultimate strength of shear walls. It is based on application of the theory of perfectly plastic materials. When applied to concrete the theoretical solutions must be modified by inserting into the solutions a reduced compressive strength of concrete. The reduced strength is named the effective strength. The paper describes simple lower bound solutions. They consist of pure strut action or strut action combined with diagonal compression fields outside the struts. Near moment maximum and near supports the stress fields are modified to save longitudinal reinforcement. Upper bound solutions are summarized briefly. The lower bound method has been compared with around 200 tests taken from the literature. With very simple formulas for the effectiveness factor, excellent agreement has been obtained. The tests cover concrete compressive strengths up to 140 MPa and reinforcement yield strengths up to 1420 MPa. The work was carried out as a Ph.D. study by the first author, the second author supervising the study.Keywords: shear wall, plasticity, strut and tie, load-carrying capacity, concrete, reinforcement.