The wall is 40' long 20' high and consists of two 15' shear panels on either end separated by a 10' long 10' high opening in the middle. I have calculated a 10 kip lateral load acting on the entire wall or 5 kips per panel. First of all, do I analyze the entire 40' wall or look at each 15' segment when trying to determine the soil reactions. Secondly, I imagine the soil reaction will be some triangular shape but how do I determine where it acts. I came across an example for a laterally loaded column using an eccentricity, e=M/P, in order to locate the location of the resultant. Does this also work for a shear wall? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
The conservative way to handle this is: distribute the base shear to the shear walls. Then for each wall analyze its base pressure by M = V*h (height of wall), e = M/P,
S (stress) = P/A*(1 +/- 6*e/L). A=b (footing width)*L (Length).
If the entire footing is in compression, you are home free. If it's heel is in tension, you can reiterate the process with L'=L-length in tension until the tension is gone. Or, you may want to utilize the weight from the tension side tranverse wall. It is more realistic, but I wouldn't get to depth on that, because there are other factors need to be looked into.
Would you have to analyze each panel individually or could you analyze the entire wall as a whole since they share the same continuous footing?
The bearing pressures come out much higher when you analyze them individually - Could this process be too conservative? Would analyzing the entire wall be conservative enough?
