Update Resilient Steel Plate Shear Walls Second Quarter 2015

P resented here are some highlights from a comprehensive, innovative and international study on resilient steel plate shear walls. The research capitalizes upon the high strength, elastic stiffness and energy dissipating capabilities of steel (a.k.a. special) plate shear walls, with steel web plates and boundary elements, to create more efficient, robust and economical systems. For example, the seismic force resisting system is reimagined as a recentering and easily repairable steel plate shear wall. The research has also capitalized upon the expertise as well as computational and experimental capabilities of a team from Taiwan and across the United States. The research was conducted through the George E. Brown Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with supplementary support from AISC. The research team is led by Professor Jeffrey Berman at University of Washington (UW). Key personnel from UW include Professor Laura Lowes, Dr. David Webster, now a Senior Associate at Thornton Tomasetti, and Dr. Patricia Clayton, now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Lead researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) are Professor Larry Fahnestock and Dr. Daniel Borello, now on the faculty at Oregon State University. Collaborators from the University at Buffalo (UB) include Professor Michel Bruneau and Dr. Daniel Dowden, now the Structural Engineer at the UB Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory (SEESL). Professor Keh-Chyuan Tsai and Research Fellow Chao-Hsien Li have led the work at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) in Taiwan. The research team received extensive additional support from student research assistants and technical staff, and these contributions are acknowledged in the cited documents. Steel plate shear wall (SPSW) research has been active for over 30 years, and progress toward more widespread implementation is being made (Berman, 2014). The stiff and ductile system relies on yielding of tension strips after buckling of the web plates and yielding at the beam ends and at the column bases. Seismic design provisions for special plate shear walls are in the ANSI/AISC 341-10, and documents such as the AISC Design Guide 20 (Sabelli and Bruneau, 2006) provide a framework for ductile design and detailing. Notable projects in the United States include the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Seattle (Seilie and Hooper, 2005) and the 56-story L.A. Live Hotel & Residences, the first SPSW high-rise building in Los Angeles (AISC, 2008). The recently completed collaborative research has contributed to the state of the art with deeper investigations into the complex behavior of the web plates and boundary elements of SPSWs, creation of more efficient and resilient SPSWs, and development of validated performance-based design guidelines for those new systems. Highlighted here are research on the SPSW web plate stress field, studies on coupled SPSWs, investigation of self-centering SPSWs, modeling of the web plates for self-centering SPSWs and the viability of web plates connected only to the beams in the self-centering SPSWs.