Introduction.

A major structural system in todays tall building structural design is the use of
shear walls. Structures that solely rely on shear walls is obviously called a shear wall
structure.
Shear walls provide a high in-plane stiffness and strength for both lateral and
gravity loads, and are ideally suitable for tall buildings, especially those conceived
in reinforced concrete.
Tall buildings designed to carry the entire lateral loading through shear walls can
be economical to heights of around 40-stories. Taller structures than 40 stories
usually combine shear walls with other structural systems.
Shear walls are continuous from the top of the building down into the foundations,
to whom they are rigidly attached. They are thus analyzed as vertical cantilevers.
In our previous lecture we saw that the term shear walls is a misnomer, because
shear walls deform predominantly in flexure.

Shear walls should be

located so that they carry
both the lateral loads and
gravity loading sufficiently
to cancel the maximum
tensile bending stresses in
the bottom of the walls
caused by the lateral loads.
Obviously, the most effective
location of the walls is at the
buildings perimeter.
However, this conflicts with
most architectural desires.
The figure at right shows
that shear walls (in yellow)
can be singular or planar in
L-shape, T-shape and Ushape, plus a combination of
these.
The walls are typically
combined in use with the
elevator core and the
stairwells and other service
cores.

This lecture studies the behavior of shear walls linked to the floor slabs. The slabs are
assumed to have little or no flexural (bending) resistance, so that they only capable of
transmitting horizontal forces into the shear walls.
Tall buildings using shear walls will consist of an assembly of walls of different lengths
and thicknesses. Linking these walls requires a careful study of how the moments and
shears redistribute their loads between the walls and their connecting girders and floor
slabs.
A common rule-of-thumb used by designers of shear walls (for example, LeMessurier),
is that the first iteration for the shear wall would assume a 1 wall thickness for each floor
height. Therefore, a 40-story building will set the initial shear wall thickness to 40 inches.
Thereafter, the analysis will decrease this thickness to a slightly smaller value (such as,
, , etc per floor for the higher levels).
Shear walls can be designed to be either:
a) proportionate, or
b) non-proportionate system of walls.

In a proportionate wall
system, the ratios of the
flexural rigidities remain
constant throughout their
heights. These walls do not
incur any re-distribution of
shears or moments at the
change of levels. This system
is statically determinate,
and from equilibrium, the
external moment and shear
is distributed between the
walls in proportion to their
flexural rigidities.

the moment of
inertia changes
consistently
throughout

In a non-proportionate wall system,

the ratios of wall flexural rigidities
are not constant up the buildings
height.
At stories where the rigidities
change there will be redistributions
of the shears and moments in the
walls.
This system is statically
indeterminate and difficult to
analyze by hand. For that reason,
they are analyzed using the finite
element method or the analogous
frame analysis.
the moment of
inertia does not
changes
consistently
throughout