Plane stress walls

CYPECAD’s module: "Plane stress walls", designs reduced thickness reinforced concrete walls with a single reinforcement plane, which are used as load bearing walls to support vertical loads and also resist horizontal forces acting in the plane of the wall.

Properties and use of plane stress walls

Plane stress walls are reduced thickness reinforced concrete walls with a single reinforcement plane, which are used as load bearing walls to support vertical loads and also resist horizontal forces acting in the plane of the wall. They are commonly used in some countries: Columbia, Ecuador, India or Peru.

In Peru, they are also known as limited ductility walls. A high number of residential buildings with heights ranging from five to ten floors, built in Lima, have slabs and limited ductility walls as their main structural system. The structural system of Limited Ductility Wall Buildings competes with the structural system of those which have been built with confined masonry load bearing walls. The speed with which limited ductility walls are built, as well as their low cost, makes them a good option for economical buildings.

Plane stress walls in CYPECAD

CYPECAD allows users to introduce and design this type of reinforced concrete walls (Beam Definition tab > Walls/Beams > Define wall > Plane stress walls) if the user license contains the Plane stress walls module.

The forces the program uses to design the plane stress walls are those which are located in its plane (vertical axial force, horizontal axial forces and tangential axial force).

Plane stress walls can be designed using any of the concrete codes implemented in the program, regardless of whether the code mentions them or not. For codes that do not have any specific criteria for this type of walls, the minimum steel areas established for regular reinforced concrete walls will be applicable and provided in their single reinforcement plane.

The program limits the thickness of these walls depending on the selected reinforcement code:

• With IS 456: 2000 (India), the thickness of these walls has to lie between 10 cm and 17 cm.
• With the remaining implemented concrete codes, the thickness of these walls can range from 10 cm to 25 cm.

CYPECAD allows users to limit the diameters of reinforcement, this way the minimum cover dimensions are maintained.