FEM Analysis and Seismic Design of Steel Plate Shear Wall Structure

In recent years, several researchers have confirmed that steel plate shear wall (SPSW) is a very effective energy dissipation element to reduce seismic responses of building structures. It has been investigated for the use in retrofit and new design as a primary lateral force resisting system in building structures. Researchers have also confirmed that SPSWs constructed with buckling restrainers dissipated more energy compared with the unrestrained SPSWs. However, detailed ABAQUS analysis made for large scale test specimens are rather limited. For this purpose, the objectives of this study include: 1) conduct FEM model development and make detailed comparisons among FEM and test results, 2) after achieving an accurate model, investigate the development of tensional field action, the shear force distribution between the boundary frame and the steel panel at various levels of deformation, 3) investigate the effects of boundary member’s stiffness and strength on the performance of SPSW, 4) investigate the effects of reduce beam section (RBS) of FEM boundary beams on the flexural demand of boundary beam-to-bundary column connections, 5) investigate the capacity design criteria of the boundary beam elements. Based on the investigation of different several analytical cases, recommendations are presented for the ductile design of SPSW the beams of boundary frame and the SPSW systems.
ABAQUS analysis is used first to investingate the overall behavior of the four single story single bay SPSWs tested in NCREE. It is illustrated that the hysteretic responses of the three SPSW specimens can be accurately simulated by using a tri-linear combined isotropic-and-kinematic hardening material model. In addition, it is found the FEM model without restrainers had an elastic stiffness of 607MN/radian, only overestimate the experimental stiffness by 5%. It is confirmed from the FEM analysis that a flexural requirement of wl2/4 for the boundary beam is appropriate based on the ultimate vertical tension load w. It is also confirmed from the FEM analysis that the tension field action of SPSWs could not be adequately developed if the flexural capacity of the boundary beam is weaker than the strength noted above. If the capacity design principle is properly applied on the SPSWs, FEM analysis illustrates that the boundary columns take about 30% story shear at a low level inter-story drift of about 0.5%~0.7% radians but gradually increase up to 50% story shear at an interstory drift of 0.05 radian.