Fracture mechanism of reinforced concrete non-structural wall

Following recent earthquakes in Japan, there are several reports of damage to nonstructural walls in reinforced concrete buildings, which causes problems for their continued use. Thus, it is important to consider structural strength as well as damages in design. In this paper, we propose a performance design method to evaluate the fracture mechanism of non-structural walls. In other words, we propose a method to evaluate the levels of shear crack (i.e., width, number of cracks, and crack width) to determine the relationship between shear load and deformation. We focus specifically on crack width. First, we conducted an experiment on the walls and investigated the influence of the rebar arrangement on cracks. The shear strength increases, and the crack width was found to decrease when the rebar separation became narrower and the rebar ratio increased. Subsequently, we reproduced the behaviors of the test specimens observed in the earlier experiments via FEA. Further, we propose a method to calculate the crack width. We also propose a formula for the maximum strain of rebar necessary to calculate the crack width.