Nonlinear analysis of steel buildings with steelplate shear walls

Steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) have been frequently used as the primary or part of the lateral force-resisting system in design of low, medium, and high rise buildings. The present work targets to study the behavior of steel building with and without SPSWs and to assess the influence of thickness of SPSW on the seismic performance of the building. To this, three-dimensional models of four story bare and SPSW included buildings were developed and analyses were performed by SAP 2000 program. Pushover analysis and nonlinear time history analysis were conducted to investigate the seismic behavior. Four different earthquake ground motion records were employed in the analysis. The main parameters in this study were the use of SPSW and its plate thickness variations of 0.5 to 9 mm. The comparative results were obtained in terms of capacity curve, displacement, inter-story drift, displacement time history, and base shear time history. It was pointed out that the response of the case study structures were improved by the inclusion of SPSW based on the plate thickness variation.