Research Spotlight: Experimental Studies on Corrugated Steel Plate Shear Walls

SSRC 2017 Annual Stability Conference

Session S8: Stability of Wall Systems Thursday, March 23, 2017 3:00 p.m.

Experimental Studies on Corrugated Steel Plate Shear Walls

Corrugated Steel Plate Shear Walls (CoSPSW) are lateral load resisting system in which corrugated steel plates are embedded inside a boundary frame, with the corrugation oriented in the horizontal or vertical direction. This paper presented experimental research on the cyclic behavior of corrugated steel plate shear walls as a new type of steel plate shear wall system. Three 1/3-scale two-story single-bay scaled CoSPSW specimens were designed and tested using quasi-static loading. Two of the corrugated specimens had corrugated panels with the type I geometric property of deeper groove, one horizontal-oriented and one vertical-oriented, while the third corrugated specimen was assembled with corrugated panels with the type II geometric property of shallower groove and also horizontal-oriented. And similar test was conducted on a 1/3-scale single-bay two-story conventional unstiffened SPSW specimen for comparison. Although hysteretic behavior of the unstiffened and corrugated specimens was different, eventually in all the cases, the failure of the specimen was caused by the fractures of the steel infill panels and the yielding and buckling of the bottom of columns. And the specimens all behaved as a desirable sequences of yielding: the infill panels yielded first and dissipated energy, then the boundary beams yielded and formed plastic hinges to dissipate noticeable energy, the boundary columns yielded and formed the plastic hinges at the bottom at the last. All the specimens showed high ductility during the test, and the specimens reached a maximum story drift of at least 0.04 when they failed and dropped to 85% of their shear capacities. The connection between the wall panel, including the flat and corrugated panels, and the boundary frame were capable of developing the full strength of the infill panel. The corrugated steel panel were able to effectively improve the elastic buckling capacity, out-of-plane stiffness and lateral stiffness of the shear wall system, especially the ones with the type I geometric property of deeper groove. Although the ultimate strength of the unstiffened specimen was larger compared to that of the corrugated specimens, the corrugated specimens were able to yield at a relatively larger drift and larger lateral load and dissipate energy through plastic deformation without any pinching in the hysteretic loops. And the ductility ratio of the corrugated specimen was larger than the unstiffened specimen. In a word, the corrugated specimens could solve the major issues that arise in an unstiffened thin SPSW effectively as expected. In addition, the behavior of the corrugated specimens was not greatly affected by changing the corrugation direction, but greatly affected by changing the geometric property of deeper or shallower groove. So further investigation of the better type selection for the corrugated panels was quite necessary in the future study.

Qiuhong Zhao, Jing Qiu, and Nan Li, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China