Abstract
The shear walls with a U or L shaped section are commonly employed in building structures to resist the lateral forces imposed by earthquakes. In this paper, the three dimensional analysis of open-section shear walls included in frames is presented. The main features of the proposed theory are as follows; 1) The each plane walls which forms a non-planar shear wall is devided at each floors, and its wall elements have only in-plane stiffness and torsional stiffness. A beam theory is applied to the wall elements, but the expansion and contraction force which is contrived for the first time in this paper is existing on the edge of the wall elements. 2) A direction of the shearing stresses is taken into account as to the shearing stiffness of the wall elements. The proposed method of analysis appears to result in fairly good estimations of both deflection and plane stress in comparison with existing experimental test results.
