Comparison of concrete tall building behavior using an intermittent shear walls form in one frame with continuous shear walls form.

In this study a new approach of using shear walls in the buildings has been introduced. Shear walls are the vertical component of lateral load resisting system of a structure. Shear walls transfer lateral loads from a horizontal diaphragm above to a diaphragm or wall below, or to the foundation. The use of continuous shear walls in height of building from structural viewpoint is very useful. However in some buildings, the continuous shear walls lead to some difficulties, such as architectural limitations, unwanted force interaction effect between frame and walls especially in the upper stories and huge foundation design requirement under the shear walls. In this paper to overcome the above problems, staggered shear walls has been used in the plane of one frame. For this purpose three building with nine, eleven and thirteen stories have been modeled and static and dynamic analysis were performed. All dynamic analyses have been carried out using acceleration spectrum recommended in Iranian building code standard No.2800. Analysis were performed by Etabs2000 software. Finally, the behavior of aforementioned structures such as, the frequencies, the maximum lateral displacements and the internal forces have been compared. The results have shown an increase in the lateral stiffness of the structure using the proposed shear wall pattern. Also the applied maximum moment and axial force exerted to the foundation has been reduced using this approach.