Seismic behaviour of steel plate shear walls by shake table testing

This dissertation describes an experimental and analytical study on the behaviour of steel plate shear walls with thin unstiffened webs when used as primary lateral load resisting system in medium- and high-rise buildings. The steel plate shear wall system resembles a vertical plate girder. The theory that governs the design of steel plate shear wall structures is essentially the same as that of plate girders developed by Basler in 1961.; To verify the guidelines and design principles provided in the latest version of Canada's National Standard on Limit States Design of Steel Structures, an experimental testing program accompanied by numerical investigation was conducted. During the first phase two single storey single bay specimens were tested cyclically to gain information on the general behaviour of the system and verify the adequacy of fabrication procedures. In the second phase, a single bay four-storey 25% scale specimen was tested under a quasi-static cyclic testing protocol. As the third phase of testing, a similar four-storey specimen was tested on the shake table under low, medium and intense dynamic horizontal base motions.; The two single storey and one four-storey test specimens were loaded to maximum displacement ductilities of 7 × $dy$, 6 × $dy$ and 1.6 × $dy$, during the first and second phases of testing, respectively. The single storey specimens proved to be very stiff, showed good ductility and energy dissipation characteristics, and exhibited stable behaviour at very large deformations following many cycles of loading.; For the third phase of testing the dynamically tested four-storey specimen was subjected to a number of site-recorded and synthetically generated ground motions with varying intensities. The limited capacity of the shake table prevented the attainment of significant inelastic response in the specimen.; Results from the scaled steel plate shear wall tests were used to verify numerical models and to gain an understanding of how the various methods of modelling the shear resistance of thin infill plates would affect the predicted results. In general, the code prescribed strip models overpredicted the elastic stiffness of the test specimens, while the yield and ultimate strength were reasonably well predicted. The discrepancies between the analytical and experimental results was more dramatic for the four-storey specimen than the single storey specimens.; An improved numerical model was proposed that utilizes discrete strips placed at different angles. A semi-empirical equation was proposed to determine the effective width of the steel panels in resisting storey shears. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...