For a structural engineer a tall building can be defined as

one whose structural system must be modified to make it

sufficiently economical to resist lateral forces due to wind
or earthquakes within the prescribed criteria for strength,
drift and comfort of the occupants.
High land prices, limitations of its availability, transport
problems and in-creasing availability of energy, advance
in technology and communications among other
between them, are moving the society to grow vertical.
Between 1940 and 1950 shear walls were introduced as
an economical efficient bracing system for multistoried
buildings.

 Traditionally, the primary concern of the structural

engineer designing a building has been the provision of a
structurally safe and adequate system to support vertical
loads.
The effect of lateral loads like wind loads, earthquake
force and blast force etc., are attaining increasing
importance and almost every designer is faced with the
problem of providing adequate strength and stability
against lateral loads.

 The buildings are subjected to both vertical and

horizontal loads.
Ideally an efficient system should not require an increase
in the sizes of members when the effect of lateral loads
is also incorporated('Premium free design ).
Horizontal loads can be divided into the following three
categories: (I) Wind loads
(ii) Earthquake loads, and
(iii) Blast loads.

The structural requirements are: (a) Strength

(b) Stiffness
(c) Stability
The functional requirements are:To prevent non-structural damage in frequent minor
ground shaking
To prevent structural damage and minimize nonstructural damage in occasional moderate ground shaking
To avoid collapse or serious damage in rare major
ground shaking

 Reinforced concrete (RC) buildings often have vertical

plate-like RC walls called Shear Walls.
Shear walls are vertical elements of the horizontal force
resisting system or Shear walls are vertical walls that are
designed to receive lateral forces from diaphragms and
transmit them to the ground.
The forces in these walls are predominantly shear forces
in which the fibers within the wall try to slide past one
another

 Shear walls provide large strength and stiffness to

buildings in the direction of their orientation.
shear walls carry large horizontal earthquake forces, the
overturning effects on them are large.
Shear walls should be provided along preferably both
length and width.
Door or window openings can be provided in shear
walls, but their size must be small to ensure least
interruption to force flow through walls.
Shear walls in buildings must be symmetrically located in
plan to reduce ill-effects of twist in buildings.

 Simple rectangular types and flanged walls(bar

bell type)
Coupled shear walls
Rigid frame shear walls
Framed walls with in filled frames
Column supported shear walls
Core type shear walls

 Shear walls, in particular, must be strong in themselves

and also strongly connected to each other and to the
horizontal diaphragms.
In a simple building with shear walls at each end, ground
motion enters the building and creates inertial forces that
move the floor diaphragms.
This movement is resisted by the shear walls and the
forces are transmitted back down to the foundation.
While designing the walls a balance must be found in the
ratio of vertical load and ductility.
The possibility of any of the modes of failure occurring
can be minimized by increasing the vertical load on the
wall.

As shear walls act primarily as cantilevers they have three

basic failure modes.

 The stiffness of the shear wall, just like its strength,

depends on the combined stiffness of its components.
Shear walls provide stiffness in large part by the ratio of
their height to width.
Long short walls are stiffer than tall narrow ones.
For a wall of constant height, the stiffness will grow
exponentially as the wall length increases.

 Properly designed and detailed buildings with shear

walls have shown very good performance in past
earthquakes.
In past earthquakes, even buildings with sufficient
amount of walls that were not specially detailed for
seismic performance (but had enough well-distributed
reinforcement) were saved from collapse.
Shear walls are easy to construct, because
reinforcement detailing of walls is relatively straightforward and therefore easily implemented at site.

Japanese
concrete
shear-wall
apartment buildings after the 1964
M 7.2 Niigata earthquake. Despite
the fact that the foundations of the
buildings failed due to liquefaction,
the
building
structures
were
undamaged and the buildings were
later jacked back to an upright
position and they were reoccupied.

Shear core used in multi-storey

structure (NZ).

Millikan Library, a 9 story

El Castillo Building in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico.
building in Pasadena, CA, USA 19story, 2 basement concrete shear wall
structure

 seminar\new1.doc

 Murthy, C.V.R. (2004), Earthquake tip 23, IITK-bmtpc Earthquake tips, IIT
Kanpur, India.
IS 1893(Part 1) : 2002, Criteria for Earthquake Resistant Design of Structures,
BIS, New Delhi
IS 13920: 1993 code of practice for Ductile detailing of reinforced concrete
structures subjected to seismic forces.
P.C.Varghese, Advanced Reinforced Concrete Design, Prentice-Hall of India
Private Limited, New Delhi, 2001 .
Paulay,T. and Priestley, M.J.N (1992) , Seismic design of reinforced concrete
and masonry buildings.
Farzad Naeim, The seismic design handbook, Chapman and Hall, New York1999.
J. N. Bandyopadhyay, Earthquake Resistant Design and Detailing of RCC
structures as per codal provisions, chapter 17-SE 106 NPCBEERM, MHA
(DM).