Modified PFI Model for SPSWs with Moderate and Stocky LYP Steel Infill Plates

Steel plate shear walls have been used as a lateral force-resisting system in design of various buildings to resist both wind and earthquake loads. Current practice in the United States and Canada is to use unstiffened slender-web steel plate shear walls, which buckle at very low loads and the resistance of the panel is dominated by tension field action in post-buckling stage. However, the premature buckling of slender plates may pose serviceability problems and also result in reduced structural and seismic performance. Application of low yield point (LYP) steel in shear walls allows the employment of moderate and/or stocky infill plates with low yielding and high buckling capacities, which can result in enhanced buckling stability, serviceability, and energy dissipation capacity of such systems. Hence, it is important to be able to predict and characterize the structural behavior of such stiffening and damping systems via simple approaches. This paper addresses this need by providing a slightly-modified plate-frame interaction model for steel shear walls with moderate and stocky infill plates. The limiting thicknesses corresponding to simultaneous buckling and yielding of moderate infill plates are primarily determined via theoretical and numerical approaches, and the effectiveness of the modified analytical method is evaluated through comparison with both experimental and numerical results. It is demonstrated that the modified plate-frame interaction model is able to properly represent the structural behavior of moderate- and stocky-web steel shear walls, which can be effectively used in design of such systems.

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