Analysis and design recommendations for diagonally stiffened steel plate shear walls

• Good agreement between analytical and experimental results observed.
• Triangular plates at the bottom of the columns showed to be very effective.
• It is shown that mesh size plays a vital role on precision of results.
• An analytical formulation is proposed for this new system.

This paper presents a comparison of analytical and experimental results of an investigation on the diagonally stiffened steel plate shear walls (SPWs). Experimental studies were carried out on three 1/3-scaled, one story single bay shear walls. The first specimen was a control specimen which was unstiffened and the other two specimens were diagonally stiffened using different stiffener configurations. Finite-element models of full SPWs are developed using finite element model. The results are compared with experimental results to investigate the influence of stiffeners on the behavior of the specimens. Good agreement between analytical and experimental models is found in point of failure modes and specimens' behavior. Based on the theory of plates and shells and frame analysis an equation is proposed to calculate the strength of both stiffened and unstiffened SPWs which could predict the experimental results accurately.