Peak shear strength of flanged reinforced concrete squat walls

Abstract

Flanged RC squat walls, defined by a shear span ratio less than two, are widely used in conventional buildings and nuclear facilities. However, due to the mechanical defects and insufficient parameters included, equations available in building codes and the literature exhibit significant scatter in predicting the peak shear strength of such walls. In this paper, a modified strut-and-tie model, including effects of flanges, was developed to account for the force-resisting mechanism in flanged RC squat walls and to derive the function form of the peak shear strength equation. Nonlinear regression was conducted to obtain the magnitude of unknown coefficients in the function form using a database containing 119 walls. The finalized equation was simplified and evaluated with models available in the literature. Results revealed that the proposed equation performs much better than current methods and provides guidance for the design of flanged RC squat walls.