The Design of Ductile Reinforced Concrete Structural Walls for Earthquake Resistance

In the design of reinforced concrete multistorey buildings, in which lateral load resistance has been assigned to structural walls, the emphasis should be on a rational strategy in the positioning of walls and the establishment of a hierarchy in the development of strengths to ensure that in the event of a very large earthquake brittle failure will not occur. The preferred mode of energy dissipation should be flexure in a predictable region. Therefore failures due to diagonal tension or compression, crushing of concrete in compression, sliding along construction joints, instability of wall elements or reinforcing bars and breakdown of anchorages should be suppressed. These aims may be achieved with the application of a deterministic design philosophy and they necessitate special detailing and dimensioning of potentially plastic regions of walls. In several areas differences exist between code provisions and practices in the United States and New Zealand.