Structural behavior of reinforced concrete frame wall components

Reinforced concrete buildings with shearwalls are very efficient to resist earthquake disturbances. In general, reinforced concrete frames are governed by flexure and shearwalls are governed by shear. If a structure includes both frames and shearwalls, the complicated interaction of these two components will exist. This paper describes experiments on frames and frame-wall structures, and the experimental results are used to check the analytical models. The tests include four frames and two frame-wall structures. The effects of concrete compressive strength, section size and wall on the frames are investigated. For frames, the horizontal force-displacement relationship predicted by the trilinear theory is in good agreement with the test data. However, for frame-wall structures, both the softening truss model and the IDARC program give deviations from the test values in the horizontal force-displacement relationship.