Computer-based evaluation of design methods used for a steel plate shear wall system

Abstract

Vertical boundary elements (VBEs) play a key role in seismic performance of steel plate shear wall (SPSW) system and consume major part of the steel material in a structure. The different methods allowed by design standards for computing the force demands exerted on the VBEs yield in widely varied results and are evaluated in this study through a computer-based approach. After elaborating these methods, development of a versatile and user-friendly program is presented that implements various SPSW design algorithms. The program relies on component object model technology and interactively communicates with a component object model supporting program, etabs, as the analysis core. It also benefits from an object-oriented structure. At the next phase, the developed program is utilized to design SPSWs with different heights and extract VBE demands using different methods. Nonlinear time history analyses of the structures, performed in opensees software using a bin of seven ground motion records, have been ultimately used for assessing the precision of different demand estimation methods. The AISC 341-10 capacity-based design method was shown to provide overestimations that reached 90% and 1888%, respectively, for axial and flexural VBE demands of 17-story building. Lower overestimation ratios were found for shorter structures. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.