Investigations on The Structural Behavior of Steel Plate Shear Walls with Partially Interconnected Infill Plates

Steel plate shear walls are considered an effective lateral load-resisting system widely used in space-constrained high-rise buildings. Steel plate shear walls could improve several structural parameters such as strength, energy absorption, and stiffness. Recently, there is a tendency to have limited connection between the infill plate and boundary elements to prevent significant direct demands on columns, and possible brittle modes of behavior leading to the economical design of various structural elements. However, previous studies showed that the absence of the interconnection between infill plate and columns in steel plate shear walls with beam-connected systems could reduce the performance of the system significantly. In the present study, procedures to improve the performance of the steel plate shear walls with limited infill plate interconnections with the boundary elements are provided. Subsequently, computational steel plate shear wall models, with and without boundary infill plate stiffeners and different widths of the infill plate have been investigated after fully validating the computational modeling methodology to find efficient procedures for eliminating the lack of interconnections. The results show that utilizing boundary stiffeners increased ultimate strength, energy dissipation and stiffness by 15%, 20%, and 24% on average. Although boundary stiffeners cannot fully control the out-of-plane displacements of the infill plate, they would be useful in improving the formation of tension field actions. Furthermore, it is shown that the width of the infill plate and boundary stiffeners are the key factors in the performance of the system.