Strip model for steel plate shear walls with beam-connected web plates

Abstract

Steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) are a lateral force-resisting system in which thin infill plates (web plates) are connected to the boundary frame (i.e., beams and columns) along four edges. Despite shear buckling of thin plates upon lateral loading, web plates still provide lateral strength and stiffness in the post-buckling range owing to a mechanism called tension field action. The boundary frame (particularly columns) needs to satisfy stringent strength and stiffness requirements to anchor the inclined forces in web plates resulting from tension field action. An alternative system to conventional SPSWs, steel plate shear walls with beam-connected web plates (B-SPSWs), is proposed in the literature where web plates are connected to beams only. Therefore, high flexural and axial load demands in columns induced by tension field forces are eliminated. However, due to the difference in boundary conditions of web plates, the load path of steel plate shear walls with beam-connected web plates significantly differs from that of conventional SPSWs. In this study, a simplified strip model of beam-connected web plate is proposed to simulate the cyclic behavior of beam-connected web plates. As it is typical and conservative to ignore the compressive strength of strips, strip models underestimate the strain energy dissipated under cyclic loading. An equation for the compressive strength of strips is proposed to accurately capture the energy dissipation capacity of beam-connected web plates. A three-way comparison between the proposed strip model, a strip model from the literature, and a validated continuum model is provided. The results reveal that the proposed strip model is capable of successfully estimating the boundary frame demands, lateral load capacity, and energy dissipation of beam-connected web plates.