Effective stiffness of coupling beams in structural walls

Abstract

Abstract Structural walls with openings are widely used as lateral load bearing elements in designing earthquake resistant multi-storey buildings. When idealizing this type of structural wall for lateral load analysis, frame modelling is considered as being both practical and accurate. This model consists of vertical wall parts and horizontal coupling beams with certain infinitely rigid portions within the walls. One of the problems encountered in this idealization is the determination of the length of rigid portions of the beams for computing their effective stiffnesses. In this paper, this aspect of the idealization procedure is investigated and the results of a parametric study are presented.