Shear resistance of buckling-restrained steel plate shear walls

Abstract

The buckling-restrained steel plate shear walls (SPSWs), which consist of a steel plate sandwiched in between by two reinforced concrete (RC) cover plates, are known to be a robust and efficient lateral load-resisting system. Since the initial imperfection between the RC plates and the inner plate which is mainly caused by the fabrication and construction errors, the high-order buckling deformation generally forms in the compression zone of inner steel plate. Therefore, a modified method based on the high-order buckling analysis on the inner panel is developed to predict the shear resistance of buckling-restrained SPSWs in the present study. Furthermore, the available experimental data from literature is employed to establish the validation of the modified method, and the shear resistance predicted by the proposed method reasonably agrees with the test results. In addition, the effect of the flexural stiffness of vertical boundary elements (VBEs) is also investigated. The minimum moment of inertia of VBEs is then proposed so that the inner steel plate fairly uniformly forms the tension field. Moreover, the pushover analysis is conducted using nonlinear finite element (FE) method to establish the validation of the proposed VBEs flexural stiffness. The FE results are then compared with that predicted by the proposed method and a reasonable agreement is generally achieved between them.