The impact of RC shear wall openings at the lateral stiffness of the cantilever shear walls

Nowadays, Finite Element Method has large impact and huge usage in civil engineering application. It is used in simulating and analyzing civil engineering problem numerically. One of these problems is the openings at shear walls. Shear walls may be used to resist the lateral loads such as wind and earthquake loads. Due to architectural requirements like windows and doors, the shear walls contain openings. In this study, the effect of the window’s and the door’s openings at reinforced concrete shear walls is studied by using linear elastic analysis at SAP2000 to give a general conceptual sense about opening’s effect. It is found that the lateral stiffness is affected by the size of the openings. It can be considered that the window’s opening has a small effect on the lateral stiffness and may be neglected if the window’s opening area ratio to the total wall side area is up to 3%. Also, when the wall height to length ratio increases, the effect of opening decreases. Moreover, the minimum door opening ratio that converts the solid wall to a frame will be equal to 65% from the total wall area.