Abstract:
Coupled shear walls are one of the systems commonly used in medium and highrise structures to
resist lateral forces. Yet these systems should not collapse or be induced severe damage during
earthquake actions. For this reason, coupled shear walls must have high strength, high ductility,
high energy absorption capacity and high shear stiffness to limit lateral deformations. The recent
advances in structural engineering have increased the interest in performance based design. In the
study herein, hence, the performance based design of a coupled shear wall system has been
carried out. The design has later been checked against nonlinear time history analysis and the
design performed has been confirmed to be quite safe. In the second stage of the study, the
horizontal capacity of couple shear walls is predicted by the pushover analyses. Though these
procedures have been used for different types of structures, they have not been employed for
coupled shear walls. The procedures employed are conventional pushover (deformation and
forced based), force based adaptive pushover, and deformation based adaptive pushover. The
capacity curves obtained through these procedures have been compared with the one determined
through Incremental Dynamic Analysis. The evaluation shows that it is almost unlikely to
determine the capacity curve of coupled shear walls by the nonlinear static analyses.
Nonetheless, the displacement based adaptive pushover analyses has been able to predict the base
shear capacity and capture the displacement profile of the system up to a certain level in the
nonlinear region.
