IDEALIZED REDUCTION OF LOAD-BEARING CONCRETE WALLS INTO SYSTEMS CONSISTING OF BARS

Load-bearing concrete walls are extensively used nowadays in tall buildings to resist lateral loads, especially in seismic zones, throughout the world. The authors had the opportunity to make relevant site observations and commentary studies covering also the behavior of concrete shear walls. Theoretically, these walls should be idealized as two dimensional elements since one of the dimensions (the thickness) of these structural elements is too small compared the other two. But, in many cases time may be saved and error generating complications in the computer analysis may be evaded by reducing these two-dimensional structural elements into collections of one-dimensional elements, that is, elements consisting of bars. In this study the fundamental concepts involved in such a reduction are discussed with emphasis on the justification of the first order linear theory of elasticity for small displacements, ordinarily used in the analysis of such structures, although the materials used (both steel and concrete) are no more idealized as linearly elastic.