Employment of low-yield stress steel plates in shear wall systems has been demonstrated in a number of studies to be a promising alternative for improving the buckling stability, energy absorption capacity, and serviceability of these lateral force-resisting systems, in which material yielding of infill plates may occur either before or after or even at the same time as geometrical buckling。 Accordingly, based on their slenderness parameter as well as buckling and yielding behavior, infill plates in steel shear wall systems may be pided into slender, moderate, and stocky categories with respective early buckling, concurrent buckling and yielding, and early yielding char- acteristics。 Such a classification enables the accurate evaluation of buckling and yielding behavior of low yield point steel plate shear walls, which can consequently result in efficient structural and economical design of these lateral force-resisting as well as energy dissipating systems。 On this basis, this paper assesses the structural behavior as well as plate–frame interaction characteristics of unstiffened low yield point steel plate shear wall systems via finite element and analytical approaches。 Following the experimental validation of the numerical modeling, advantages of use of low yield point steel as compared to the conventional steel are demonstrated。 Subsequently, the structural performances of code-designed shear walls with slender, moderate, and stocky low yield point steel infill plates are evaluated comparatively。 Finally, the effectiveness of a modified plate– frame interaction (PFI) model in predicting the response of steel shear wall systems with moderate and stocky infill plates is demonstrated。87370
1。Introduction
Steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) have been frequently used in the United States, Japan, and Canada over the past three decades or so。 Considerable amount of theoretical and experimental research has been conducted in Canada, Iran, Japan, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States on their structural behavior and analytical model- ing as a lateral force-resisting system in design of low-, medium-, and high-rise buildings against seismic and wind loads。 The advantages of using SPSWs as the lateral force-resisting system in buildings include stable hysteretic characteristics, high plastic energy absorption capacity, and enhanced stiffness, strength, and ductility [18]。
SPSWs have been used with two different design philosophies as well as detailing strategies。 One approach employs heavily-stiffened SPSWs to ensure that the wall panel achieves its full plastic strength prior to out-of-plane buckling。 Thus, the stiffened wall panels can resist large lateral forces and dissipate earthquake-induced energy。 Such systems are current practice in Japan, where high-fabrication cost is
tolerated in order to guarantee high seismic and structural performance。 North American practice, on the other hand, is to use thin unstiffened steel wall plates, which exhibit nonlinear behavior at relatively small story drifts as they buckle out of plane [8]。 The elastic shear buckling of the thin plate in SPSW usually results in reduced stiffness, strength, and energy dissipation capacity。 Although the tension field action is able to provide the post-buckling strength, however if the shear buck- ling occurred in the early stage, out-of-plane permanent deformation may affect the serviceability of the thin-plate shear wall under small or moderate earthquake [6]。 Even though the infill plates can be either stiffened or unstiffened depending on the design philosophy, labor costs in North America indicate that unstiffened panels are preferable [11]。
Buckling stability, energy dissipation capacity, and serviceability of SPSW systems can be improved by either increasing the web-plate thickness or using horizontal and vertical stiffeners。 Nevertheless, this may not result in economical design of shear walls with conven- tional steel infill plates。 Application of low yield point (LYP) steel with extremely low yield stress and high elongation capacity, developed by the Nippon Steel Corporation in Japan [23], nowadays provides the possibility to design relatively economical SPSW systems with high structural and seismic performance。