New details and analytical equations for the connection of steel coupling beam to RC shear walls

A new connection is proposed for connecting a steel coupling beam to an RC shear wall. It consists of vertical steel studs at the upper and lower flanges at the two ends of the embedment length of the beam. Using the beam-on-elastic-foundation approach, behavior of the suggested connection zone is analyzed and investigated in comparison with the ones suggested by the building code. Selected results of such an analysis are verified using the finite element approach. It is shown that addition of the H-section studs being 150 mm in length and 50 mm in flange width, without using any shear studs, results in increase of axial and bending stiffness of the connection at the junction of steel coupling beam and RC shear wall to 26% and 21% relative to the code-prescribed connection for the same embedment length. The proposed connection while having a 30% shorter embedment length than the one prescribed by the code enjoys the same connection stiffness provided by the code. Graphs of vertical deflection of the beam axis and diagrams of shear force and bending moment along the suggested connection zone derived by hand calculation of beam-on-elastic-foundation procedure have a very good resemblance with those calculated by the finite element method for both the proposed and the code-based connections and the reported experimental results for the latter ones.