Response of Heavily Reinforced High-Strength Concrete Coupling Beams

Understanding the strength and stiffness of coupling beams is essential when determining the lateral performance of coupled shear wall high-rise concrete buildings. This paper investigates these properties using full-scale experiments and comparative analytical studies. Adequate strength and ductility can be achieved with shear-critical coupling beams by using large amounts of well-detailed stirrups, even if these exceed the ACI Code upper limits on shear capacity. These limits are shown to penalize the strength of heavily reinforced, high-strength concrete coupling beams. Shear and localized wall deformations contribute significantly to the overall beam response. Ignoring either of these deformations can result in over-predicting the lateral stiffness of the building. The new program Response is shown to be a powerful tool to accurately predict load-deformation behavior, having an average test-toprediction ratio for shear strength of 1.04, and 1.14 for the displacement at peak load.