Most commercial buildings among existing RC buildings in Korea have a multi-story wall-frame structure where RC shear wall is commonly used as its core at stairways or elevators. The members of the existing middle and low-rise wall-frame buildings are likely arranged in ordinary details considering building occupancy, and the importance and difficulty of member design. This is because there are few limitations, considerations, and financial burdens on the code for designing members with ordinary details. Compared with the intermediate or unique details, the ductility and overstrength are insufficient. Furthermore, the behavior of the member can be shear-dominated. Since shear failure in vertical members can cause a collapse of the entire structure, nonlinear characteristics such as shear strength and stiffness deterioration should be adequately reflected in the analysis model. With this background, an 8-story RC wall-frame building was designed as a building frame system with ordinary shear walls, and the effect of reflecting the shear failure mode of columns and walls on the collapse mechanism was investigated. As a result, the shear failure mode effect on the collapse mechanism was evident in walls, not columns. Consequently, it is recommended that the shear behavior characteristics of walls are explicitly considered in the analysis of wall-frame buildings with ordinary details.

An approximate analysis method is proposed to predict the dynamic amplification of shear forces in ordinary reinforced concrete shear walls as a preliminary study. First, a seismic design for three groups of ordinary reinforced concrete shear walls higher than 60 m was created on the basis of nonlinear dynamic analysis. Causes for the dynamic amplification effect of shear forces were investigated through a detailed evaluation of the nonlinear dynamic analysis result. A new modal combination rule was proposed on the basis of that observation, in which fundamental mode response and combined higher mode response were summed directly. The fundamental mode response was approximated by nonlinear static analysis result, while higher mode response was computed using response spectrum analysis for equivalent linear structural models with the effective stiffness based on the nonlinear dynamic analysis result. The proposed approximate analysis generally predicted vertical distribution of story shear and shear forces of individual walls from the nonlinear dynamic analysis with comparable accuracy.