Numerical Assessment of Steel Plate Shear Wall with Coupling (SPSW-WC) System Design Procedure

Graduation date: 2017The Steel Plate Shear Wall (SPSW) system, is an innovative seismic lateral force resistant system, which has experienced increased use over the last three decades. The SPSW system is composed of boundary elements which anchor web plates that develop diagonal tension fields. A number of SPSW buildings have been built in Japan and North America. The SPSW system offers high ductility and good energy dissipation. Compared to concrete shear walls, they o er thinner wall thickness that can reduce the self weight of the structures and save floor area, faster construction and are easier to retro t. However, SPSW systems suffer from low stiffness, difficult construction sequences and relative unfamiliarity that may lead to higher costs. Therefore, the Steel Plate Shear Wall with Coupling (SPSW-WC) system has been developed to negate these disadvantages.\ud \ud The SPSW-WC system can lead to greater material efficiency by linking a pair of SPSW piers together with coupling beams at the floor levels. A design procedure has been developed for the SPSW-WC system. However, the seismic response of the resulting SPSW-WC systems has not been extensively studied to ensure uniform performance over a range of coupling levels.\ud \ud Web plates play a significant role in resisting lateral loads and dissipating energy in the SPSW-WC system. In this thesis, the strip model of SPSW was selected for structural numerical modeling using the Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (OpenSees) software package. The nonlinear response of the steel plates and formation of plastic hinges were directly modeled. The numerical models were validated using existing SPSW experimental testing. A suite of 6 prototype structures were developed to explore the influence of coupling on the seismic response using incremental dynamic analyses (IDA)