Construction Materials and Structures 1249

S.O. Ekolu et al. (Eds.)

IOS Press, 2014
2014 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-466-4-1249

Effect of shear wall in improving the

reliability of RC frame buildings subjected
to seismic loading
Mohamed A. DAHESH, Ahmet TUKEN and Nadeem A. SIDDIQUI1
Department of Civil Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Abstract. In the past, several researches have been carried out to study the
influence of shear walls on controlling the lateral stiffness/story drift of the RC
buildings under seismic forces. But the level of increase in the reliability due to the
implementation of shear walls was not studied much. In the present study, a simple
Monte Carlo Simulation-based methodology has been presented by which increase
in the reliability level due to the addition of shear walls in RC building frame was
quantitatively assessed. In order to demonstrate the methodology, first a 10-story
seismically deficient (in terms of lateral stiffness) rectangular RC frame building
having no shear walls was subjected to an earthquake of known magnitude and its
reliability against lateral drift was estimated. The building was then laterally
stiffened by shear walls in the two orthogonal directions and reliability indices
were estimated again in each direction. It was demonstrated that the shear walls
improve the reliability against serviceability limit state of lateral drift dramatically.
A parametric study was also carried out to obtain that value of story weight below
which the building is as reliable as desired (i.e. reliability index 3.0).

Keywords. RC shear wall-frame building, seismic loading, serviceability limit

state, Monte Carlo simulation

Introduction

A reinforced concrete (RC) multistory frame building must possess adequate strength,
lateral stiffness and ductility if it is likely to be subjected to moderate to severe
earthquakes. The requirements of strength and ductility can easily be satisfied by
selecting the adequate section sizes of the frame-members and required detailing of
their reinforcements. However, in order to satisfy the requirements of lateral stiffness, a
sufficient amount of shear walls should be provided in the building. In the past, several
researches have been carried out to study the influence of shear walls on controlling the
lateral stiffness/story drift of the RC buildings under seismic forces. Balasubramanian
et al. [1] presented an improved method for estimation of stiffness of brick masonry
shear walls with opening. Their proposed method was applicable to both strong
spandrel-weak pier and weak spandrel-strong pier conditions. The results of the
proposed method were in good agreement with the results of finite element analysis
and experimental test results. Burak and Comlekoglu [2] performed an analytical study
to evaluate the effect of shear wall area to floor area ratio on the seismic behavior of

1
Corresponding author: nadeem@ksu.edu.sa
1250 M.A. Dahesh et al. / Effect of Shear Wall in Improving the Reliability of RC Frame Buildings

mid-rise reinforced concrete structures. The analytical results indicated that, in order to
control the drift, at least 1.0% shear wall ratio should be provided in the design of mid-
rise buildings. They also found that when the shear wall ratio increases beyond 1.5%,
the improvement of the seismic performance was not so significant. Tuken and
Siddiqui [3, 4] proposed an easy to apply analytical method to determine the amount of
shear walls necessary to make reinforced concrete buildings seismic-resistant against
moderate to severe earthquakes. The analytical procedure was demonstrated by
implementing it on a 10 story 3-D reinforced concrete (RC) building. Lee and
Haldar[5] developed an efficient algorithm to evaluate the reliability of a steel frame
and reinforced concrete shear wall structural system subjected to static loading. In a
companion paper [6], the algorithm was extended to consider dynamic loading,
including seismic loading.
The above review shows that a very limited research was conducted on reliability
assessment of RC frame buildings containing shear walls. Also the level of increase in
the reliability due to the implementation of shear walls was not studied much. In the
present study, a simple Monte Carlo Simulation-based methodology has been presented
by which increase in the reliability level due to the addition of shear walls was
quantitatively assessed.

1. Reliability analysis

In order to carry out the reliability analysis of RC frame building, with and without
shear walls, a limit state function describing the failure criterion is required. This
function assumes a negative or zero value at the failure and a positive value when the
structural system or member is safe. Thus we can define the probability of limit state
violation (i.e. probability of failure) as

Pf P>g ( x) d 0@ (1)
where, g (x) is the limit state function and x is the vector of basic random variables.
In the present study, the story drift of the structure is considered to be the serviceability
limit state. For the serviceability criterion, the limit state function can be expressed as

g ( x) G lim  G cal (2)

Where lim = allowable story drift prescribed in the code. In the present study this value
was taken as 0.02 times story height as described in SBC 301 [7].The story drift (cal)
was computed as the difference of the lateral deflections at the top and bottom of the
story under consideration (i.e. i= yi- yi-1). This value was multiplied by a deflection
amplification factor Cd (as per SBC 301, Cd= 6.5 for special RC moment frames) and
divided by the importance factor I (=1 for the present study) as per section 10.9.7.1 of
SBC 301 [7].
After providing the shear walls, the lateral deflections at each story level was
obtained by solving the following governing differential equation, derived considering
the shear wall-frame interaction [4].
 M.A. Dahesh et al. / Effect of Shear Wall in Improving the Reliability of RC Frame Buildings 1251

d 4w d 2w v2 1
s2  2  2 M 0 ( x)  s 2 f ( x) 0 (3)
dx 4 dx v

Where, s2= K / (v2GA); GA= the shear rigidity of the frame per unit height (i.e.
equivalent shear stiffness of the building); K= K(shear walls) + K(columns);
K 6EI = total stiffness of all shear walls within the story (since stiffness of the
columns are very small compared to total stiffness of all the shear walls within that
story, K (columns) term can be neglected); f(x) = distributed lateral force; M0(x) =
K
moment caused by the external loads at height x; v2 1 ; K0= flexural rigidity
K0
of the structure in the horizontal plane. The lateral deflections at each story level for the
pure frame building (without shear walls) was obtained by solving the governing
differential equation given by Baikov [8]. Having derived the limit state function the
next step is the assessment of probability of failure and reliability (measured in terms
of reliability index ) of the frame structure. For this purpose, Monte Carlo Simulation
technique [9] was employed.

2. Numerical study and discussion of results

To study the effect of shear walls on the overall reliability of the building a typical 3-D
regular frame building containing no shear walls was studied first (Fig. 1). The
statistical characteristics of the selected random parameters, required for the reliability
analysis are given in Table 1. In this study only these four parameters were considered
random as they have considerable uncertainty in their values as given in Table 1; other
values were assumed to be deterministic as shown in Table 2. The frame is subjected to
dead, live, and horizontal seismic loads. To evaluate the reliability of the building
against the serviceability limit state, the horizontal drift of the top floor was considered
not to exceed 0.02 times hs, where hs is the story height (= 3m). Thus the limiting drift
is equal to 60 mm in the present numerical study. The frame was then stiffened with
shear walls in x- and y-directions as shown in Fig. 2. The thickness of all the shear
walls were taken as 250 mm. Due to the presence of these shear walls, the lateral
stiffness of the building increased substantially and thus the lateral drift reduced
considerably.

Table 1. Basic random variables and their statistical values

Random Variable Nominal value Bias factor COV Distribution
Story weights, wi 7.0 kN/m2 1.05 0.125 Lognormal
Design spectral response acceleration, SDS 2.2 m/s2 0.78 0.15 Normal
Modulus of elasticity of concrete, E 23500 MPa 1.0 0.18 Lognormal
Building height, H 30 m 1.05 0.05 Normal
1252 M.A. Dahesh et al. / Effect of Shear Wall in Improving the Reliability of RC Frame Buildings

Table 2. Deterministic values

Random Variable Value
Column size 600600 mm
Beam size, bwD 250450 mm
Slab thickness, t 120 mm
Compressive strength of concrete, fc 20 MPa
Yield strength of steel, fy 420 MPa
Response modification factor, R 6.5
Occupancy importance factor, I 1.0

Figure 1. Typical floor plan of the 3-D building studied (without shear wall)

Figure 2. Typical floor plan of the 3-D building studied (with shear wall)
 M.A. Dahesh et al. / Effect of Shear Wall in Improving the Reliability of RC Frame Buildings 1253

The Monte Carlo simulation results presented in Table 3 shows that, for the frame
without shear walls, the probability of failure of the building frame when earthquake is
considered from x-and y-directions are 0.99961 and 0.99980 respectively. These values
show that it is almost certain that building drift will exceed the limiting value of the
drift under present seismic loads. 100,000 simulation were used for carrying out the
reliability analysis of building frame containing no shear walls and at least 1 million
simulations were employed for carrying out the reliability analysis of building frames
with shear walls. A substantially higher number of simulations were used for reliability
analysis of shear wall-frame building, because the expected probability of failure of the
shear wall-frame building was of the order of 10-6.Table 3 also shows that the
probability of failure of the building in x-direction is lesser than the probability of
failure in y-direction. This can be attributed to the higher stiffness of the building in x-
direction compared to y-direction. This study thus clearly illustrates the beneficial
effects of shear walls in carrying the seismic loads and controlling the lateral drift at the
top of the building frame.

Table 3. Results of the reliability analysis of building frame without and with shear walls
Seismic ground Frame without shear wall Frame with shear wall
acceleration in

Pf Pf
x-direction 9.996110-1 -3.36 1.0010-6 4.75
y-direction 9.998010-1 -3.54 12.0010-6 4.22

It is also obvious from the table that when shear wall of almost equal quantity was
provided in the two directions, the probability of failure reduced dramatically and
reliability improved to an extent that it reached to the target value (generally 3.0, [9]).

Figure 3.Variation of reliability index with story weight

1254 M.A. Dahesh et al. / Effect of Shear Wall in Improving the Reliability of RC Frame Buildings

The effect of story weight on reliability index of Shear-wall frame building was carried
out to arrive at the results of design interest. For the design purposes, the parameters
should be selected in such a manner so that ( T)2 0. Here and T are the actual
and target reliability index values. ( T)2 0 is an indication that the reliability of
the shear-wall frame building is equal to the target reliability value. Figure 3 shows that
as the story weight is increasing reliability is continuously decreasing. This is due to
the fact that with the increase of story weight base shear increases which in turn
increases the story drift. Consequently probability of reaching to the limiting drift value
increases; thus reliability decreases or probability of serviceability failure increases.
This graph illustrates that reliability of shear-wall frame building is lesser when it is
subjected to the earthquake from y-direction. This is so because building is less stiff in
y-direction compared to x-direction. Figure 3 shows that the present building is reliable
(against the seismic ground acceleration acting either in x- or in y-directions) to the
desired extent provided the story weight is approximately less than or equal to 8.5
kN/m2. Beyond this story weight, reliability will sharply decrease to a value less than
3.0.

3. Conclusions

In the present study, a simple Monte Carlo Simulation-based methodology was

presented by which increase in the reliability level due to the addition of shear walls in
RC building frame was quantitatively assessed. It was demonstrated that the shear
walls improve the reliability against serviceability limit state of drift dramatically.
Providing shear walls of even small magnitude (about 1% or less of shear wall to floor
area ratio) can make a highly deficient RC frame building (against lateral drift) a safe
and reliable RC frame building. The effect of story weight on reliability of RC shear-
wall frame building was also studied to obtain that maximum story weight below which
the building is as reliable as desired (i.e. reliability index 3.0).

Acknowledgement

The work presented in this paper was funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research,
Research Centre, College of Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
through Research Grant No. 19/434.

References

[1] S.R. Balasubramanian, K.B. Rao, D. Basu, M.B. Anoop, and C.V. Vaidyanathan, An improved method
for estimation of elastic lateral stiffness of brick masonry shear walls with openings,KSCE Journal of
Civil Engineering, 15(2011), 281-293.
[2] B. Burak, and H.G. Comlekoglu, Effect of shear wall area to floor area ratio on the seismic behavior of
reinforced concrete buildings, Journal of Structural Engineering, ASCE, 139(2013), 1928-1937.
[3] A. Tuken and N.A. Siddiqui, A simplified analytical procedure to determine the amount of shear walls
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Concepts in Concrete and Masonry Structures, AMCM 2011, Ktakow, Poland, June 13-15, 2011.
 M.A. Dahesh et al. / Effect of Shear Wall in Improving the Reliability of RC Frame Buildings 1255

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