For my Master’s thesis, I am modeling a simple reinforced concrete shear wall from an experimentally tested specimen presented in a paper, in order to obtain the shear wall’s load carrying capacity. I am first performing validation, but I’m facing some issues and I have a few questions:

1. My results under monotonic loading show some differences. How can I improve them?

2. The paper does not provide the load protocol, although the specimen was also tested under cyclic loading. I also want to run the model under cyclic loading, but in GiD I don’t know how to define the cyclic loading to match the paper’s results.

3. Another issue in validating a beam is that my model’s stiffness is too high and differs from the experimental results. How can I improve it so that my results match the experimental data?

Thank you in advance for your guidance.