Efficient three-dimensional seismic analysis of a high-rise building structure with shear walls

In many cases, high-rise building structures are designed as a framed structure with shear walls that can effectively resist horizontal forces. Many of the high-rise apartment buildings recently constructed in the Asian region employ the box system that consists only of reinforced concrete walls and slabs as the structural system. In most of these structures, a shear wall may have one or more openings for functional reasons. It is necessary to use a refined finite element model for an accurate analysis of a shear wall with openings. But it would take a significant amount of computational time and memory if the entire building structure were subdivided into a finer mesh. Thus an efficient method that can be used for the analysis of a high-rise building structure with shear walls regardless of the number, size and location of openings in the wall is proposed in this study. The proposed method uses super elements, substructures and fictitious beams. Static and dynamic analyses of example structures with various types of opening were performed to verify the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. It was confirmed that the proposed method can provide results with outstanding accuracy requiring significantly reduced computational time and memory.