Discussion: Seismic performance of lightly reinforced structural walls for design purposes

摘要

The paper on the seismic performance of lightly reinforced concrete walls by Wibowo et al. (2013) is both interesting and timely, but several points require clarification. The authors defined lightly reinforced structural walls as having a total vertical reinforcement ratio between 0·2% and 2%. However, the lateral load behaviour of concrete walls within this range would vary substantially. A single flexural crack may form in a wall with 0·2% vertical reinforcement, whereas a wall with 2% vertical reinforcement would be expected to form a ductile plastic hinge with a large number of well-distributed cracks. The range of vertical reinforcement ratios may be too large to develop a suitable analytical model to represent the range of expected behaviour.