Published works

Limited-ductile reinforced concrete structures have been known to perform poorly when subjected to large seismic ground motions. Many buildings in Australia rely on reinforced concrete shear-cores as their primary lateral load resiting system, but these are only required to have a low standard of detailing as per the current concrete material standards AS 3600. While there is some literature available on the numerical and analytical modelling of rectangular shaped shear walls, non-rectangular shear walls have not been extensively analysed. “C-shaped” shear walls are commonly found enclosing a service core, lifts, stairs and toilets. This paper presents a study which looks at the seismic performance of C-shaped shear walls with different steel reinforcement ratios for low, mid and high-rise buildings. The current earthquake actions code AS 1170.4 has been used for a preliminary design of the walls using a force-based design approach within which the intention is to satisfy the performance objective of life safety in a 500 year return period earthquake design level event in Melbourne. The displacement capacity of these different core walls has been calculated using a Displacement-Based Assessment procedure and complemented with finite element modelling program SeismoStruct. The results of a probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) using the AUS5 recurrence model that has been conducted for the city of Melbourne has been used to calculate more accurate predictions of the displacement response spectra for 500 and 2500-year return periods. The C-shaped core walls have then been assessed by comparing the displacement capacity at different structural performance limit states to the displacement spectra derived from the current earthquake loading code AS 1170.4 and the spectra results from the PSHA for both the 500 and 2500-year return periods and for soil classes Be and De.