Plastic hinge length for coupled and hybrid-coupled shear walls

A coupled wall consists of two or more reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls (SWs) connected by RC coupling beams (CBs) or steel CBs (hybrid-coupled walls). To fill the gap in the literature on the plastic hinge length of coupled walls, including coupled and hybrid-coupled shear walls, a parametric study using experimentally validated numerical models was conducted considering the axial stress ratio (ASR) and coupling ratio (CR) as the study variables. A total of sixty numerical models, including both coupled and hybrid-coupled SWs, have been developed by varying the ASR and CR within the ranges of 0.027-0.25 and 0.2-0.5, respectively. A detailed analysis was conducted in order to estimate the ultimate drift, ultimate capacity, curvature profile, yielding height, and plastic hinge length of the models. Compared to hybrid-coupled SWs, coupled SWs possess a relatively higher capacity and curvature. Moreover, increasing the ASR changes the walls' behavior to a columnlike member which decreases the walls' ultimate drift, ductility, curvature, and plastic hinge length. Increasing the CR of the coupled SWs increases the walls' capacity and the risk of abrupt shear failure but decreases the walls' ductility, ultimate drift and plastic hinge length. However, CR has a negligible effect on hybrid-coupled walls' ultimate drift and moment, curvature profile, yielding height and plastic hinge length. Lastly, using the obtained results two equations were derived as a function of CR and ASR for calculating the plastic hinge length of coupled and hybrid-coupled SWs.