Numerical investigation of composite shear walls with different types of steel and concrete materials as boundary elements

The main objective of this study was to numerically assess the effect of boundary elements with different types of steel and concrete materials on nonlinear behavior of composite steel–reinforced concrete wall (CSRCW) by employing ABAQUS software. Two types of common steel profiles including box and I-shaped sections, located at the middle and extremities of the wall, were employed to assess the ultimate strength of CSRCW. In addition, effects of concrete confinement on boundary elements were investigated for fully and partially encasement degrees. Following this, steel materials with three yield stresses of 300, 400 and 500 MPa, and concrete in two grades with compressive strengths of 30 and 40 MPa were used. The theoretical results demonstrated that numerical models predicted the fracture zones similar to experimental observations, where the failure modes of CSRCWs appeared to have ductile mechanisms. In addition, based on the numerical outputs, the presence of I-shaped steel section in the middle of CSRCW participated to effectively distribute the stress throughout the shear wall, which was found to be 6.5% higher than that conventional shear wall. Furthermore, the use of steel boundary elements with higher strength caused to obtain the highest amount of the ultimate strength for CSRCW up to 397.1 kN.