Experimental and theoretical studies of steel shear walls with and without stiffeners

Steel plate shear walls are lateral load resisting systems, especially against earthquake excitation. They are constructed with or without stiffeners. In contrary to stiffened steel plate shear walls, there are many theoretical and experimental studies on these systems without stiffeners and different analytical methods have been presented for them which are mostly applicable to very thin steel plates shear walls. In this research, two one story similar steel plate shear walls with and without stiffeners and one of their surrounding frames were tested and the behavior of them was studied. The results showed that, installation of stiffeners improved the behavior of the steel plate shear walls. It caused 26% increase in energy dissipation capacity and 51.1% increase in the shear stiffness of steel plate while its effect on the steel plate shear strength was minor. In addition, the Plate-Frame interaction theory (PFI) was verified by using the experimental results and the test results showed that, this theory has good capability for predicting the shear load – displacement curve behavior of steel shear walls with or without stiffeners.