Limit state analysis of reinforced shear walls

The nonlinear analysis of reinforced concrete structures is revisited. In particular, reference is made to the nonlinear static analysis of structures containing shear walls, for which we present a dedicated shell element. The developed element formulation is flexible enough to allow for nonlinear material constitutions for concrete and re-bars and arbitrarily distributed steel reinforcement. Moreover, for shear walls coexisting with frame elements within the same structural system, it allows to capture the effects of localized actions such as concentrated forces or moments transmitted by the nearby framed part the structure. Numerical results are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in finite element computations.