Seismic Behavior and Design of Assembled Slit Shear Walls Using Low Yield Point Steel

Abstract

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.

Experimental Investigation into Failure Modes of Low-Yield-Point Steel Plate Shear Walls

“…The LYP SPSW structural system consists of an infill panel made of low-yield-point steel and an external frame [22,23], which possesses the lower yielding characteristic and higher buckling capacity of the infill panel, and prominent lateral resisting stiffness and excellent ductility performance of an overall system [24][25][26]. The low-yield-point steel appears to have extremely low-yield strength, which could dissipate the abundant seismic energy by plastic deformation earlier under the action of an earthquake [27][28][29][30][31].…”