Pierced Shear Walls of Stepwise Variable Thickness

The continuous connection technique is now established as a quick and accurate method for the analysis of uniform pierced shear walls, which are commonly used as the primary structural element for high-rise buildings. While the Hetenyi method has been used to account for the variable wall thickness of tall buildings, it has the disadvantage that a series of terms must be summed until convergence for each discontinuity. This note illustrates how a system of Macaulay's brackets may be used to incorporate directly the discontinuity effects in the general solution for uniformly distributed loads. An analysis of load distribution for pierced shear walls consisting of three segments of uniform thickness is presented.