Analytical Study on High Strength Concrete Shear Walls

This paper presents an analytical study on the behavior of high strength concrete (HSC) shear walls. Several experiments on HSC shear walls with concrete strength above 60 MPa have been selected to be studied. Data from various experiments were collected and nominal wall strengths have been calculated using several building code formulas, such as those of the ACI (American), AIJ (Japanese), and EC (Eurocode). Subsequently, nominal wall strengths from the building code formulas were compared with actual wall strengths from experiments. Moreover, normalized actual wall strengths over nominal wall strengths and the average shear stresses were also plotted against some significant factors such as shear span ratio, axial load ratio, ratio of longitudinal and transverse reinforcements, etc., in order to observe the behavior of HSC shear walls as influenced by various parameters. The analysis results show that most of the building code formulas underestimate HSC wall strengths for low shear-span ratio (below 2.0) but they predict more accurately for high shear-span ratio (above 2.0). Furthermore, from the results, it seems that axial load up to 0.15 (f�c Ag) does not contribute much to the wall strengths. In addition, the comparative study shows that the contribution of longitudinal reinforcement to wall strengths is more significant than that of the transverse reinforcement. This phenomenon is not accounted for in most building code formulas. Thus, there is a need to develop an expression that can take into account this phenomenon and that can yield better predictions of the strength of HSC walls.