A Study on Effect of Shear Connectors in the Structural Performance of Steel-Concrete-Steel Sandwich Shear Walls

Steel-concrete-steel (SCS) shear wall consist of two steel face plates and a sandwiched concrete core which are bonded together by mechanical shear connectors to form an integral unit to resist external loads. The steel face plates were connected together using tie rods and to the infill concrete using headed studs respectively. The advantages of the SCS Sandwich structure over the traditional reinforced concrete are that the external steel skin plates act as the permanent formwork and flexural reinforcement and offer water proofing protections. This paper presents a robust finite element model developed in ANSYS Workbench for Nonlinear cyclic analysis of the SCS walls. Rectangular SCS shear walls with an aspect ratio of 1.0 were modeled and analysed under displacement-controlled, in-plane cyclic loading. A parametric study was carried out to investigate the effects of different shear connector configurations and push over analysis was performed to determine the best connector configuration. A new structural topology has been introduced for better performance.