Cyclic Test of a Coupled Steel Plate Shear Wall Substructure

This research aimed to investigate the seismic behavior and design of the Coupled Steel Plate Shear Wall (C-SPSW). A prototype six-story C-SPSW building was designed based on the model building code. A 40% scale specimen was constructed as the bottom two-and-half-story substructure of the six-story C-SPSW prototype. The reduced scale substructural specimen was cyclically tested using the Multi-Axial Testing System (MATS) at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE). In addition to the cyclic lateral forces, the constant vertical loading and cyclic overturning moments were applied on the specimen simultaneously. The test results show that the CSPSW specimen behaved in a ductile manner and dissipated significant amounts of hysteresis energy during the cyclic loadings. Finally, based on the experimental results, the implications in the capacity design for the bottom boundary column are discussed. A numerical simulation using finite element model was conducted. The analytical results quite match the overall and local experimental responses.