On the design of stiffeners in steel plate shear walls

This paper describes a numerical investigation to provide a practical design method for stiffening thin steel plate shear walls. The procedure considers one-sided transverse and longitudinal flat stiffeners located in various arrangements on shear plates which effectively divides the plate into subpanels and expands tension fields across the infill walls. The results obtained from several nonlinear static analyses are employed to draw applicable empirical relationships for evaluating optimal dimensions of stiffeners. The procedure also ascertains the effects of optimised stiffeners on the postbuckling behaviour and ultimate load bearing capacity of stiffened shear walls.