A PROCEDURE FOR THE EVALUATION OF COUPLING BEAM CHARACTERISTICS OF COUPLED SHEAR WALLS

The behavior of coupled shear walls is governed by coupling beams. This paper presents a simple technique for the purpose of design to determine an appropriate level of yield moment capacity for the coupling beams. This technique is checked against nonlinear static pushover analysis performed using DRAIN-3DX for the usual case of symmetric coupled shear walls with different types of coupling beams. The assumption of pinned base in the shear walls with steel coupling beams yields results which agree closely with those of DRAIN-3DX. For the case of fixed base shear walls, the design technique is expected to be conservative.