Analysis of stiffened multi-bay coupled shear walls on elastic foundation using continuous connection method

In this article, the static analysis of a multi?bay coupled shear wall, resting on an elastic foundation, having any number of stiffening beams, is studied employing the continuous connection method (CCM). The shear wall is considered to be made up of a finite number of sections in the vertical direction, with or without stiffening beams between each pair of consecutive sections. Each bay of every section of the wall has fixed connecting beam properties throughout the particular region. The method of analysis, which warrants thickness variation and elastic beam-wall connections, treats the discrete connecting beams as a continuous layered medium, the shear force per unit of length integrated starting at the top expressing the unknown functions. To implement the foregoing analysis, a computer program has been prepared in the MATHEMATICA computer algebra language system. Using this program, a number of problems from the previous literature, has been solved and the results have been compared with those obtained by SAP2000 structural analysis program and a perfect agreement has been obtained to support the validity of the present method.