Strengthening of reinforced concrete shear walls with openings using carbon fiber-reinforced polymers

Reinforced concrete shear walls are one of the most widely used lateral load structural resisting elements in high rise buildings. Introducing openings in existing shear walls may be due to remodeling or municipality considerations, such as placement of staircases, windows, doors and elevators. Making openings in existing shear wall decrease the overall structural capacity and integrity of the wall, in addition to stress concentrations around the openings. This necessitates the strengthening of the opening rim with FRP wraps. This paper focuses on developing a 3D high-reliability dynamic nonlinear finite element model on ABAQUS theory manual and users’ manual, version 6.10 (2010) to simulate the behavior of shear walls with openings strengthened with FRP wraps to investigate their seismic response under the monotonic loads. The proposed FE model has been validated using previous experimental data in literature. The FE results indicated that the proposed configuration of CFRP laminates substantially increases the lateral load strength and deformation capacity of the shear wall with openings and also improves the ductility and energy dissipation of the shear wall.