Lateral Stiffness of Shear Walls with Openings

This technical note investigates the accuracy of a simplified hand method recommended in several design guidelines for practicing structural engineers for calculating the lateral stiffness of shear walls with openings. Parametric studies are performed in which the location and size of the opening as well as the aspect ratio of the wall are varied. Toward this goal, a special-purpose finite-element algorithm is developed and implemented in the computing package MATLAB. Results from finite-element analysis are compared to those of the hand method. It is found that the hand method, despite its complexity, is highly approximate and often enormously overestimates the stiffness of shear walls with openings.