The wall–frame interaction effect in steel plate shear wall systems

• A number of code designed SPSWs and the corresponding bare frames are analyzed.
• There is a complex interaction between infill wall and frame along the system height.
• Infill walls improve the behavior of moment frame systems significantly.
• The behavior of SPSW boundary frames is different from that of the same bare frames.
• SPSW frames exhibit higher performance in terms of strength, stiffness and ductility.

The overall behavior of steel plate shear wall (SPSW) dual systems comprises the contributions of the infill plate tension field and boundary frame moment resisting actions. In the literature, a moment frame acting as SPSW boundaries (SPSW boundary frame) is treated as the same frame acting alone (bare frame). However, due to an interaction effect between the infill wall and the boundary frame, the actual behavior of SPSW boundary frame is different from the behavior of the same bare frame. In the present paper, a number of code designed single and multi-story SPSWs and the corresponding bare frames are numerically analyzed (a) to study the influence of infill walls on the behavior of boundary frames and (b) to evaluate the effectiveness of infill walls. Results show that the presence of infill walls can significantly improve the performance of moment-resisting frame systems, especially for multi-story ones, in terms of strength, stiffness, ductility and energy dissipation capability. In turn, the better performance of the SPSW system than the corresponding bare frame is not only due to the contribution of the infill wall, but also due to the improvement in the performance of the frame resulted from the wall–frame interaction.