Free vibration analysis of shear wall structures with stiffening beams

The paper presents the free vibration analysis of non-planar asymmetric shear wall structures with connecting and stiffening beams. The stiff beams incorporated at various levels of coupled shear walls improve the stiffness of the structural system of the building. The analysis is based on a variant of the continuous connection method for three-dimensional shear wall structures having stepwise changes in cross-section. The mass matrix including flexural and torsional inertia is generated. As a result of solving eigenproblem, which corresponds to free vibration equation, natural frequencies and mode shapes of vibration have been received. The results obtained by this method have been compared with those available in literature and a satisfactory match has been observed.