The steel slit shear wall has attracted much attention as a lateral force-resisting system.However, issues, such as fractures formed at the slit ends and pinched hysteresis, reduce energy dissipation. To address these issues, the authors have developed a steel slit shear wall made from low yield point steel that has a low yield stress and large ductility and strain hardening. Steel slit shear walls made from low yield point steel dissipated energy at small lateral drifts, shear deformation was evenly distributed among all rows, fracture was eliminated, and "fat" hysteresis without the requirement for out-of-plane constraints was feasible. By adjusting dimensions of the link (segment divided by slits) and the number of rows of links while maintaining the required shear strength and stiffness, a small width-to-thickness ratio for the links was achievable to ensure the in-plane behavior of links and thus good energy dissipation. The combined hardening model in ABAQUS simulated well the large strain hardening of low yield point steel. A proposed design procedure that ensures good energy dissipation was given.

Steel slit shear walls enhance seismic performance of buildings significantly but when they are designed to span a column to column, some difficulties arise in construction due to their size. Flexibility in design and construction can be dramatically improved by composing a slit shear wall with a set of narrow units with large aspect ratio assembled on-site, while keeping the wall's structural performance. An experimental study was conducted to examine the behavior of assembled slit shear walls using low-yield-point steel. The test results showed that narrow slit shear walls placed independently exhibits slight pinching in hysteresis while those stitched each other using steel bands dissipated energy similarly to the original single wall. In addition, to guarantee a good energy dissipation for each narrow slit shear wall, the upper limit for the width-thickness ratios of links was determined based on a supplemental study of finite-element analyses. This upper limit implicitly controls the number of rows required in slit shear walls.

The steel slit shear wall, in which stiffness and strength are controlled by altering the length, interval and pattern of slits, has been studied as an earthquake-resisting element with high energy dissipation capacity. Local buckling in each link (the segment between slits) and strength degradation that would cause reduction of energy dissipation capacity can be restrained by increasing the number of slit rows with keeping the strength and stiffness constant. This paper proposes the use of low yield point steel (LY100) for the steel slit shear wall. Expansion of plasticity caused by the significant strain hardening of LY100 makes shear deformation distribution more equal in each slit row and disperses the strain concentrated in the edge of links. Furthermore, the larger maximum rupture strain of LY100 than that of conventional steel reduces the risk of fracture at the edge of link. The advantages of the proposed steel slit shear wall are demonstrated by both the test and analysis.