Out-of-plane buckling behavior and design of arch wall.

Arch wall is a vertical plane structure which combines pure arch, columns and beam together. The applied in-plane vertical loads on the beam will reach the large span arch through columns. For studying the stability of arch wall, the elastic and inelastic mechanical properties of arch wall were discussed in this paper by finite element method. It is shown that lateral bracing stiffness of beam and column stiffness are the key factors which affect the stability of arch wall: if the lateral bracing stiffness is less than its threshold stiffness, the arch wall shows a global out-of-plane buckling mode; if the bracing stiffness is greater than its threshold stiffness and column stiffness is less than its threshold stiffness, the pure arch shows an out-of-plane buckling mode; if both of the bracing stiffness and column stiffness are greater than their threshold stiffness, the arch wall shows an in-plane buckling mode. After that, two analytical models of arch wall from a practical engineering structure were proposed for predicting the ultimate out of plane strength of arch wall. One analytical model reflects only the arch wall laterally braced by equivalent lateral spring resulting from lateral trusses, and the other is a combination of arch wall with longitudinal trusses. The result points out that the lateral bracing stiffness of beam supplied by longitudinal trusses is much larger than the threshold stiffness, the bearing capability of arch wall can be improved only by increasing the stiffness of column or strengthening the reliable connection of column ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]