A Numerical Laboratory for Simulation of Flanged Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls

The present paper establishes the Flanged reinforced concrete (RC) Shear Wall Laboratory (FlashLab) Software Program. Despite their extensive applications in recent years, flanged RC shear walls have rarely been experimentally and numerically studied, mainly due to the difficult and time-consuming fabrication of experimental samples, numerical models, and also their analysis. FlashLab is a finite element method (FEM)-based simulator of flanged RC shear walls. Drawing on ABAQUS, FlashLab employs shell elements with longitudinal and transverse reinforcements to accurately and rapidly model the cyclic behavior of flanged RC shear walls. The FlashLab algorithms are on the basis of the Python programming language and can examine flanged RC shear walls, with a general cross-section, which make it possible to parametrically investigate various variables. In order to validate FlashLab, this paper numerically simulates T-, H-, and L-shaped RC shear walls and compares the results to the experimental data, indicating good agreement between the numerical and experimental results to an extent that the proposed numerical laboratory is capable of predicting the backbone curve with an accuracy more than 90 percent. Moreover, to verify the simulation performance of FlashLab, the shear-lag effect was parametrically studied as a unique phenomenon in flanged RC shear walls. The findings of the current study clearly demonstrates the robustness and efficiency of FlashLab in the behaviour simulation of flanged RC shear walls.