Structural Behavior of Prefabricated Shear Walls

Abstract

In precast large-panel multistory buildings, prefabricated jointed panels form the shear wall to carry the lateral loads due to wind, etc. The in situ vertical and horizontal joints form slip surfaces and the interaction between the precast panels are provided by shearing action at the joints. In this paper, plane stress and interfacial finite elements have been used to represent the precast wall panels and the in situ joints. The effect of the in situ joint properties has been studied in depth as regards the overall flexibility and stresses in the prefabricated shear wall. It was observed that very stiff vertical joints between the panels makes the shear wall stiff like monolithic cantilever walls, whereas loosely jointed prefabricated walls are more flexible. It was also observed that the effect of horizontal joints at the floor levels is only marginal under normal circumstances. Failure load of a typical prefabricated shear wall has been determined from the nonlinear analysis of the wall assembly assuming Mohr-Coulomb's failure criterion for the precast panels and nonlinear shear stiffness of the joints.