Behavior of steel plate shear wall connected to frame beams only

This paper presents the study of steel plate shear walls which are connected to frame beams only. As the shear walls are not connected to frame columns, the premature failure overall buckling or local buckling of frame columns can be prevented. In fact, most of both structural design engineers and architects prefer this kind of steel plate shear walls because the dimension of their opening space is relatively flexible by using several steel plates with small span-to-height ratio placed parallel to each other. In this paper, two steel plate shear walls were fabricated and tested. The influence of stiffeners on the hysteretic behavior of this kind of member was studied. The experimental results showed that this kind of specimen had good ductility and energy dissipation capacity. The energy dissipation capacity of specimen with stiffeners was larger than that of the specimens without stiffeners. Meanwhile, the finite element method was applied to analyze the behavior of steel plate shear walls, whose results were validated by comparing with the corresponding experimental results. Analytical results showed that the free edges deformed with evident out-of-plane deformation and should be constrained by stiffeners to meet the design requirements. The energy dissipation capacity is much better for steel plate shear walls with lower height-to-thickness ratio and larger span-to-height ratio. At last, the skeleton curve of steel plate shear wall was proposed for calculating the elastic rigidity and load-carrying capacity.