NUMERICAL STUDY ON SEISMIC BEHAVIOR REQUIREMENTS FOR STEEL PLATE SHEAR WALLS

Abstract

Shear strength of unstiffened steel plate shear walls, SPSWs, was conventionally computed assuming fully yielded in-fill plate and collapse of boundary frame elements by uniform yielding mechanism at ultimate load. Accordingly, both Canadian and American seismic provisions for design of SPSWs did introduce a minimum stiffness for vertical boundary elements (VBE) to ensure the yielding capacity of the infill plate. These seismic provisions have been investigated numerically in this research work. Unexpected failure in the VBE has been observed despite the prescribed minimum stiffness by the codes. Hence, the infill plate could not achieve the target lateral load capacity. Accordingly, a comprehensive parametric study has been conducted on SPSWs, using nonlinear finite element analysis by ANSYS software, to modify the seismic requirements for the VBE. Both stiffened and Unstiffned SPSWs have been investigated. Based on the numerical results, equations for the modified minimum stiffness and strength of VBE have been proposed so that the infill plate attains the yielding capacity. The numerical results, based on the proposed equations, have been compared with the code target lateral load capacity where good fitting has been reported