CMU Shear Wall Aspect Ratio

[StrEng007]

Outside of the empirical design section 5.3 (Lateral Stability) in ACI 530, are there any restrictions to the aspect ratio of CMU shear walls when doing analytical design?

Seems like there isn't and the best approach is to simply check for shear capacity and drift limits of the wall.

 

[ANE91]

The seismic requirements can get complicated fast. Even with an Ordinary wall, I believe that there are still certain minimum horizontal and vertical steel areas and ratios. This could affect your wall size.

You could also be limited by boundary elements. Of course, the required steel also dictates how long the wall must be, given that you can only shove so much into a cell.

Otherwise go nuts, as long as the P-M diagram works. Recall that nominal axial strength gets a haircut from stability. The hard part is figuring out what the internal stresses are at the corners of openings. I still don’t completely buy into the hand-wavy FEM/FEA stuff.

Masonry shear walls are ridiculously strong. Out-of-plane flexure (panel wall behavior) tends to govern the wall size & reinforcement.