Experimental and Analytical Studies of a Steel Plate Shear Wall System

This paper concentrates on the experimental studies of an innovative steel shear wall system used in buildings in USA, presents a summary of test results and discussion on post-test data-analyses, and compares the experimental results to FEA analyses. The innovative steel plate shear wall system, originally developed by the Magnusson Klemencic Associates of Seattle, consists of steel plate shear walls welded inside a steel boundary moment frame in two bays. The two bays are connected through wide flange (WF) coupling beams. The steel moment frame consists of exterior concrete filled steel tubes (CFT), interior WF columns, and horizontal WF beams. Cyclic quasi-static tests were conducted on two half-scale specimens representing this system with two different wall span-to-height- ratios of one-to-one and one-to-one and half. Both specimens showed high ductility and stable inelastic behavior with inter-story drift values exceeding 0.03 radians. Data analyses were conducted after the test to validate test observations and summarize general seismic behavior of the system. FEM model of the test specimen were constructed and the analytical results were compared with test results.