Hysteretic Behavior of Conventionally Reinforced Concrete Coupling Beams in Reinforced Concrete Coupled Shear Wall

This paper presents the experimental results of four full-scale coupling beams in which only horizontal reinforcements are placed, without diagonal reinforcements, with the aim to develop reinforcement details for coupling beams used in connecting side walls in a wall-slab structural system. Each coupling beam specimen was designed according to the deep-beam design procedure that does not use diagonal reinforcements and that is found in current standards. Two cases for basic deep-beam design specimens were investigated wherein (1) U-type reinforcement was added to prevent sliding shear failure of the joints and (2) horizontal intermediate reinforcements were placed. The coupling beam specimens were fabricated with a shear span-to-depth ratio (aspect ratio) of 1.68 and were connected to walls only by horizontal reinforcements, i.e., without diagonal reinforcement. The experimental results indicate that the strength of the beams was about 1.5 times the designed strength of a strut-and-tie model, which suggests that the model is available for predicting the strength of coupling beams with conventional reinforcement layouts such as horizontal and transverse reinforcement bars. The deformation capacity of these conventionally reinforced concrete coupling beams ranged from 1.48 to 3.47% in accordance with the reinforcement layouts of the beams. Therefore, this study found that the performance of conventionally reinforced concrete coupling beams with an aspect ratio of 1.68 can be controlled through the implementation of reinforcement details that include U-type reinforcement and the anchorage of intermediate horizontal bars.