Use of Composite Materials in RC Shear Wall

Shear wall is the structural component provided in midrise and tall buildings to resist earthquake and wind forces. These walls are continuous from foundation to top of buildings. Many times the wall around lift and staircase shaft of a building is designed as a shear wall. Generally these are of reinforced concrete but may be of masonry, wood, steel etc. As these walls have to resist heavy lateral forces these are of heavy sections and have a dense reinforcement at lower part which results substantial amount of closely spaced transverse reinforcement causing reinforcement congestion in boundary element creating problem of construction and placing. Heavy reinforcement and large thickness is required at lower stage and in boundary element of these walls. Displacement capacity of RC structures is generally depends on the deformation capacity of the concrete. If large displacement capacity is to be attained, steel is provided in concrete to enhance concrete behavior, particularly compressive strain capacity. To achieve these goals and maintaining size of cross section in control, heavy reinforcement ratio is required to maintain which creates problem of reinforcement congestion. To overcome this problem of reinforcement congestion a small amount of ductile material like steel fibres may be added to concrete. Many researchers had tried to investigate the behavior of RC shear wall with different composites to improve its performance but very few had tried with concrete with steel fibres. Use of composite materials steel fibers in concrete found beneficial in many structural elements is tried in this research for shear wall. In this paper finite element analysis of shear wall model has been carried out to study and compare the behavior of normal concrete shear wall and steel fiber reinforced concrete shear wall with and without opening using ETABS software to know improvement in behaviour when subjected to lateral load by adding steel fibers in concrete.