Numerical analysis of truss model as simple and efficient approach for steel plate shear wall (SPSW)

Reinforced Concrete Shear Wall (RCSW) is an efficient system for resisting the lateral loads due to its high rigidity compared to other systems, such as moment resisting frames system and steel bracing system. However, using RCSW in a building produces low ductile behaviour although special reinforcement details can enhance this ductility, but high seismic design forces will be obtained because of the increment in building weight. Therefore, it has recently started to be replaced by Steel Plate Shear Wall (SPSW) system which offers almost similar lateral force resisting capacity together with high ductile behaviour. On the other hand, SPSW has more advantages than RCSW (e.g. lighter building weight, rapid construction). The problem is that SPSW requires Geometrically and Materially Non-linear Analysis (GMNA) to obtain the real behaviour of steel plate under lateral load which causes elastic buckling prior to formation of tension field zones. It is well known that GMNA demands high level knowledge in modelling and high-level finite element software. Furthermore, GMNA costs time in simulation and data analysis. Consequently, many researchers have tried to develop a simple model for SPSW. In this research, truss elements were tested to take place of SPSW. At the beginning, GMNA was performed to achieve the behaviour of SPSW under monotonic “pushover” lateral loading. Then, equivalent number of truss elements required to obtain the same SPSW behaviour were determined. Moreover, the simple truss model was examined to fill a rigid concrete frame and produce stresses in frame elements close to ones obtained by the steel infill plate. At the end of this work, it was shown that using specific number of truss elements can achieve convergent results compared to the actual SPSW one with much faster computational time.