Steel Plate Shear Walls as an Alternative Lateral Load Resisting System

In Turkey, majority of pre-90’s reinforced concrete structures have non- ductile failure modes primarily due to inadequacy of the structural system, poor detailing and lack of confinement reinforcement in plastic hinge zones.These deficiencies have significant influence on the behavior of the structural system and a major earthquake results in a catastrophic failure for such structures.

Steel Plate Shear Walls (SPSW) have been appearing in the design codes and also have been used in practice for many years especially in U.S.A, Canada and Japan. In this study, SPSW’s are evaluated in terms of design criteria, wall types and analysis procedures. Furthermore results obtained from a retrofit design that employs SPSW are presented in this article.

The building has three stories and consists of non-ductile reinforced concrete slab-column moment frames. SPSW provide additional rigidity, strength and ductility to existing structural system. Besides, nonlinear static pushover analysis is found to be a quite efficient analysis procedure for the design of SPSW systems.

It is considered that SPSW can be a good alternative in retrofit applications to popular traditional methods and passive energy dissipating control devices that are recently gaining popularity in Turkey.

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