Shear Wall Design in ETABS - Uneconomical

[Usman3301]

Hi there, I was recently taking a seminar in which the speaker, during post-seminar discussions pointed out that ETABS shear wall design is way too uneconomical. Can someone please explain this or refer to some document/book to understand this.
Any sort of help is highly appreciated.

 

[Trenno]

What a terribly vague question, but I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess that the speaker was referring to uniformly reinforced shear walls (ETABS default?) vs clustered end reinforced shear walls.

You could make the argument uniformly reinforced walls are not as efficient, because the middle panel rebar aren't doing much given the stress profile due to in-plane bending. With clustered end shear walls you aim to run the middle panel rebar at code-based minimums and resist the bending push/pulls using larger clustered bars within the boundary elements.