Specially Shaped Reinforced Concrete Columns in High-Rise Buildings Subjected to Lateral Loads: A Review of the State of the Art, Research Gaps and a Proposed Analytical Methodology

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@article{1722432,
      author = {Aditi Pandey, Dr. Rahul Kumar Satbhaiya},
      title = {Specially Shaped Reinforced Concrete Columns in High-Rise Buildings Subjected to Lateral Loads: A Review of the State of the Art, Research Gaps and a Proposed Analytical Methodology},
      journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
      year = {2026},
      volume = {10},
      number = {2},
      pages = {1711-1729},
      issn = {2456-8880},
      url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1722432.pdf},
      abstract = {Specially shaped reinforced concrete columns of L-, T-, plus- and cross-shaped cross-section are increasingly adopted in residential and commercial construction because their limbs can be concealed within the thickness of partition walls, removing the projecting corners produced by conventional rectangular columns and releasing usable floor area. The same geometry, however, redistributes material away from the section centroid and therefore alters flexural rigidity, torsional response, mass participation and the biaxial interaction of axial force with bending, all of which govern how a tall frame responds to earthquake and wind actions. This paper reviews thirty-plus experimental, numerical and code-based investigations published between 2008 and 2026, organised into six thematic streams: member-level testing of reinforced and steel-reinforced concrete sections; composite and concrete-filled steel tube variants; finite element parametric studies; prefabricated systems; strengthening and retrofitting; and whole-building comparative analyses. The synthesis shows a consistent finding that shaped sections match or exceed the stiffness, ductility and economy of area-equivalent rectangular sections, while also revealing that loading direction, limb slenderness and axial compression ratio are decisive and inadequately codified variables. Seven research gaps are identified, the most significant being the near-absence of storey-by-storey whole-building comparisons for genuinely high-rise frames in which lateral effects dominate, and the tendency of existing frame-level studies to report a single response quantity rather than the full set of moment, shear, displacement and drift. A detailed methodology is then proposed to close these gaps, based on three geometrically identical G+12 reinforced concrete models differing only in column shape, analysed by the equivalent static and response spectrum methods in ETABS to Indian Standard provisions and validated against an independent manual design. An illustrative application indicates reductions of approximately 31% in peak bending moment, 13% in peak storey shear and 27% in peak roof displacement for plus-shaped columns relative to the rectangular baseline, and shows the baseline exceeding the code drift limitation at the first storey where the shaped models do not.},
      keywords = {specially shaped columns, high-rise buildings, lateral loads, ETABS, response spectrum analysis, storey drift, research gap, review.},
      month = {August},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV10I2-1722432}
  }