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Dear Shaker, The better way is to model this retaining wall as vertical beam element for 1 meter width. Apply the appropriate boundary conditions such as fix at bottom and free or pin at top. Apply the soil pressure laterally and then simply take moments and shear. Shear force will be used to decide the thickness. So just use the general shear formula which we normally use for one way shear and decide the thickness. For flexure use beam flexure formula to calculate reinforcement. Dear Waqas, you are right. Actually in basements the seismic shear/forces are transferred fro retaining wall to shear walls. So there will be inplane forces in the retaining wall. For flexural reinforcement you can use earth pressure but as you know there is a distribution reinforcement in the retaining wall as well. This reinforcement will be designed for inplane forces. This is very simple to calculate. Assign the one side of retaining wall as one pier. Extract V2 force and the use the length of retaining wall as depth and use one way shear formula and calculate reinforcement as in case of shear wall. Thanks Muneeb

Dear you can design it on ETABS for flexure and for shear just take shear force and check the capacity fro formulas given in ACI

Dear Khurram, This type of beam is called coupling beam or link beam. These beams connects two legs of shear wall and transfer the shear fro one wall to another and make these shearwalls to act as one unit. if you increase the size then moment and shear will be increased. If l/h <4 then you need to design that beam as link beam and ACI 21.9.7 provides guidance how to design link beam. you need to provide diagonal bars to balance the shear force. You need to design as link beam. But if still you can not satisfy the demands then you can model this beam as simply supported beam and provide the reinforcement as simply supported beam. Actually the structure will behave as we want it to behave. If you provide the reinf. to be simply supported then in case of earthquake these beams will yield and transfer the shear and flexure to the adjacent walls. Secondly if you design these as link beams the only difference is these will dissipate some energy while in the previous case these will not dissipate energy. So you can design this beam as simply supported beam. Thanks Muneeb

Khair Mubarak

absolutely..but my point of view is different....By using "Sir" it seems a more respectable approach of a learner...

Everyone is not from Nust bahi!