Abstract
The paper concerns properties indicated by reinforced concrete shear walls after cracking in shear. It is shown that walls after cracking act as diagonal 45-deg compression members, while reinforcing bars act as tensile forces perpendicular to the diagonal wall members. As a result, the maximum resisting capacities of unconstrained shear walls not having frames are determined by reinforcement quantities in the walls and may be expressed by Eq. (2). The properties indicated by shear walls with frames are analyzed by Fig. 5(e), and it is shown that load-deformation curves and stress distributions of frames coincide well with measured values. As for the mechanism indicating maximum shearing strength, there are the two types of shearing failure of frame and shearing failure of wall in compression, these strengths being expressed by Eqs. (10) and (17), respectively, with failure occurring according to the type of smaller strength.
