Steel Plate Shear Walls with Controlled Infill Tension Fields

Steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) consist of thin infill steel plates attached to beams, called horizontal boundary elements (HBEs), and columns called vertical boundary elements (VBEs) in building structural frames. Overall capacity of this system is provided primarily by the diagonal tension fields distributed along the entire length of the boundary frame elements due to the yielding of infill steel plates. Capacity design of the boundary frame, as currently designed, may result in very large demand on boundary frame members in some cases. In this investigation, tension field formation was controlled by discontinuous infill-to-boundary frame connections in order to reduce the demand on boundary elements. Finite element (FE) models of this system were developed and analyzed in ABAQUS. Behaviors of such a system (including overall capacity, initial stiffness and demand on boundary frames) were compared with those of the conventional SPSWs. Moreover, analytical models for estimating the plastic strength of SPSWs with discontinuous infill-to-boundary frame connections were presented.