A novel shell element for nonlinear pushover analysis of reinforced concrete shear walls

We present a procedure for the assessment of reinforced concrete structures in terms of seismic capacity based on the nonlinear pushover method. Structural systems containing shear walls are dealt with by adopting a newly developed reinforced shell element in which arbitrary distributions of steel reinforcement and nonlinear material behavior for both concrete and re-bars are considered. Stand-alone structural walls and a full-scale 3D building with shear walls placed along two directions are analyzed. Numerical simulations are presented that demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach in obtaining limit loads and failure mechanisms at an affordable computational cost.