Novel plastic hinge modification factors for damaged RC shear walls with bending performance

This paper introduces several new damage states for shear walls with flexural behavior damaged in an earthquake. These damage states are deducted by carefully interpretation of reported available test results of shear walls in the literature. Moreover, two methods for obtaining the plastic hinge modification factors of strength, stiffness and ductility capacity of the damaged shear walls with the flexural behavior are presented. A method based on secant stiffness at maximum displacement of each cycle of observed damage and the second method uses the reloading stiffness of the hysteresis curves consistent with damage levels. The later method introduced in this research is more reasonable for obtaining modification factors among the introduced methods. Using these factors, a reliable residual capacity for damaged structures can be assessed and the proper seismic retrofitting method can be followed. In this research, the effects of damages caused by various experimental tests have been studied on 43 reinforced concrete shear walls with flexural behavior. By introducing and describing the bending performance