Infill plate interconnection effects on the structural behavior of steel plate shear walls

Abstract Steel plate shear walls are commonly used as structural lateral load resisting load systems in space-constrained areas. Many studies indicated that the implementation of the steel plate shear walls improves the ductility, stiffness and ultimate strength of the structure for which the interconnection of the steel infill plate with boundary members has a significant role. The typical connection of the infill shear plates to the boundary elements has a high-level fixity despite the general convenient construction procedures. In this study, the connection of the infill plates to the boundary elements are precisely investigated by establishing 57 computational models after verifying the computational modeling methodology. The structural performance of the partially connected plates with different commonly used interconnections types are evaluated and compared to the corresponding conventional fully-connected infill plate systems. It is shown that beam-only connected infill plate shear wall reduces the structural lateral load resisting capacity tangibly more than column-only connected infill plates due to limited tension field action development. In addition, by having 80% connection between infill plate with boundary elements, the lateral resisting system has at least 98.9% ultimate strength, 96.5% stiffness, 97.6% ductility and 98.6% energy dissipation capability of the steel plate shear wall with fully-connected infill steel plate.