An Alternative Shear Strength Equation of Reinforced Concrete Squat Walls for Ensuring the Deformation Capacity

Low aspect ratio reinforced concrete walls are important structural components of both conventional buildings and safety-related nuclear structures because they may provide much or all of a structure's lateral strength and stiffness to resist earthquake loadings. Building codes, manuals of practice, guidelines and standards provide a number of equations for peak shear strength of reinforced concrete walls and give reasonable predictions. However, deformation capacity is also a key factor in seismic design and these equations do not account for the factor during design. In this paper, the performance of five equation sets is evaluated using data from tests of 250 solid squat walls. According to the evaluation results, one equation set with best performance is selected for developing alternative expressions.