Impact of shear wall design on performance and cost of RC buildings in moderate seismic regions

This research aims to investigate the seismic response of RC shear wall buildings of 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-, and 10-story designed as conventional and ductile and located in moderate seismic zone in Saudi Arabia in accordance with the seismic provisions of the American code ASCE-7-16. Dynamic analysis is conducted using the developed models in ETABS and the design spectra of the selected zone. The seismic responses of a number of design variations are evaluated in terms of story displacements, drift, shear and moments of both conventional and ductile building models as performance measures and presented comparatively. In addition, pushover analysis is also performed for the lowest and highest building models. Cost estimate of ductile and conventional walls is evaluated and compared to each other in terms of weight of reinforcement bars. In addition, due to the complexity of design and installation of ductile shear walls, sensitivity analysis is performed as well. It is observed that conventional design considerably increases induced seismic responses as well as cost compared to ductile one.