SEISMIC LATERAL FORCE DISTRIBUTION FOR DUCTILITY-BASED DESIGN OF STEEL PLATE SHEAR WALLS

The thin unstiffened steel plate shear wall (SPSW) system has now emerged as a promising lateral load resisting system. Considering performance-based design requirements, a ductility-based design was recently proposed for SPSW systems. It was felt that a detailed and closer look into the aspect of seismic lateral force distribution was necessary in this method. An investigation toward finding a suitable lateral force distribution for ductility-based design of SPSW is presented in this paper. The investigation is based on trial designs for a variety of scenarios where five common lateral force distributions are considered. The effectiveness of an assumed trial distribution is measured primarily on the basis of how closely the design achieves the target ductility ratio, which is measured in terms of the roof displacement. All trial distributions are found to be almost equally effective. Therefore, the use of any commonly adopted lateral force distribution is recommended for plastic design of SPSW systems