Reinforced concrete shear wall (RCSW) is important lateral force-resisting mechanism and widely used in buildings and infrastructure designed before 1980. In the recent extreme earthquake in Chile and Japan, the unexpected dynamic behavior attracted the attention. To finding the relationship between the unexpected dynamic behavior or damage and the height of RCSW building, the novel parallel three-stage multiscale finite element dynamic analysis is used which offers a novel technique that can link millimeter length scale’s microphysical damage phenomenon to the building-level non-linear dynamic response with a unidirectional seismic load. There are four different height building as target buildings (4-story building, 8-story building, 12-story building, 16-story building). In the multiscale dynamic analysis, the macroscopic and microscopic damage can be performed at the same time to find the different scales’ damage. Results show that the height of the building can affect the tensile and yield condition, inter-story drift ratio, and shear force redistribution.

The thesis is structured as follows. CHAPTER 1 introduces the background of the research, the nonlinear dynamic analysis platform and nonlinear material models used in the research. CHAPTER 2 introduces the pre-processing and post-processing strategy of the parallel three-stage multiscale finite element dynamic analysis. CHAPTER 3 presents the results of the analysis and relative discussion of the results, and the validation of the dynamic analysis model. CHAPTER 4 illustrates limitation and future work.