Comparing Steel Plate Shear Wall Behavior with Simple and Corrugated Plates

Experimental and numerical studies conducted in the past three decades have demonstrated that a steel plate shear wall is an effective and economical lateral load resisting system against both wind and earthquake forces. The system consists of infill steel plates connected to boundary beams and columns over the full height of the framed bay. The infill plates can be stiffened or unstiffened and the beam-to-column connections can be rigid or shear connections. A properly designed steel plate shear wall has superior ductility, high initial stiffness, stable hysteresis loops, and good energy absorption capacity. These characteristics make the system outstanding in high-risk seismic regions. Use of steel plate shear wall systems has been shown to be more cost effective than the other lateral load resisting systems. Steel plate shear walls are much lighter than the commonly used reinforced concrete shear walls, which reduce both the gravity loads and seismic forces. This aspect significantly reduces the foundation costs and makes the system outstanding for application in rehabilitation projects. Whereas construction cost of stiffened steel plate shear wall is more than unstiffened steel plate shear wall therefore in this investigation the unstiffened steel plate shear wall has been studied as two types of simple and corrugated plate and the behavior has been compared in one story frame. This study was conducted with finite element approach theoretically. The results of this study demonstrated that behavior of corrugated plate is superior to simple plate because it has high loading capacity, ductility and energy absorption.