EXPERIMENTAL AND ANALYTICAL STUDIES OF STEEL PLATE SHEAR WALLS AS APPLIED TO THE DESIGN OF TALL BUILDINGS

Several analytical and experimental investigations have been conducted on steel plate shear walls in Canada, the United States and Japan, fo llowing interest from the consulting and fabrication industries for th eir incorporation as viable lateral load resisting elements in new or retrofit construction. While numerous buildings with a vertically orie nted steel plate for sheer strength have been constructed in each of t hese countries, the lack of codified rules resulted in overly conserva tive designs. Furthermore, the limit of analysis tools to the linear e lastic range prevented utilization of the post-buckling strength of th in, unstiffened steel plate webs bounded by a beam and column framing system. A team of researchers from Canadian universities, consultants and the steel industry undertook to provide succinct design guidelines for the acceptance of the system by the general design profession. Cy clic quasi-static and dynamic shake-table tests on large scale and sma ll scale, single bay, multi-storey shear cores were conducted to exami ne the system's ductility performance and to verify analytical models. Further to this, a parallel design exercise of several buildings was performed to evaluate the implementation of the proposed guidelines. I n this study, three variations of a steel framed office building were used as case studies. The examples differ primarily in the systems' re quired ductility ratings. Competitive reinforced concrete designs were also performed for economic comparisons. The details and current find ings of this feasibility program are presented in this paper. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.