Improved analytical formulation for Steel-Concrete (SC) composite walls under out-of-plane loads

The concept of using Steel-concrete (SC) composite walls as retaining walls has recently been introduced by the authors and their effectiveness of resisting out-of-plane loads has also been demonstrated. In this paper, an improved analytical formulation based on partial interaction theory, which has previously been developed by the authors, is presented. The improved formulation considers a new loading condition and also accounts for cracking in concrete to simulate the real conditions. Due to a limited number of test specimens, further finite element (FE)simulations are performed in order to verify the analytical procedure in more detail. It is observed that the results from the improved analytical procedure are in excellent agreement with both experimental and numerical results. Moreover, a detailed parametric study is conducted using the developed FE model to investigate effects of different parameters, such as distance between shear connectors, shear connector length, concrete strength, steel plate thickness, concrete cover thickness, wall's width to thickness ratio, and wall' s height to thickness ratio, on the behavior of SC composite walls subjected to out-of-plane loads.