Proceedings of the 8 th U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering April 18-22, 2006, San Francisco, California, USA DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF STEEL PLATE SHEAR WALLS Matthew Eatherton 1 ABSTRACT With the first U.S. code for steel plate shear walls (SPSW) in the recently released 2005 AISC Seismic Provisions, the system will have a new level of exposure among design engineers in the U.S. There are several issues, however, that an engineer will face in deciding whether to use SPSW, and in the process of design. Aspect ratio limits in the provisions make SPSW impractical for low-rise, and shorter mid-rise structures unless between-floor stiffeners are used, but the use of between-floor stiffeners is not well defined. Plate material and thickness is of paramount importance in SPSW design, but the range of material or thickness that is appropriate is not clear. Three different methods for column design are presented in the provisions, but each comes up with different forces. Also, in determining whether to use SPSW for a project, issues such as cost, constructability, column size, length of wall required, story drift and floor accelerations should be considered. Using a 2 story sample building design, it was found that SPSW yields a structure that uses 13% less steel than moment frames, considerably less field welding than moment frames or braced frames, and significantly less wall length than braced frames. Introduction Steel plate shear walls (SPSW) consist of a plate bounded at the sides by columns, also referred to as vertical boundary elements (VBE), and at the floor levels by beams, also referred to as horizontal boundary elements (HBE). The alternate nomenclature for beams and columns emphasizes the boundary elements role of resisting the tension field developed in the plate. Figure 1 shows an example of a SPSW that was constructed in San Mateo County, CA. There has been a shift in the design methodology from the SPSW buildings built in the 1970’s to the SPSW buildings built in the past couple decades. Early designs for SPSW panels used stiffeners to preclude buckling in their relatively thick shear plate. As such, these walls are commonly called “stiffened”. In the early 1980’s research was spearheaded in Canada by Kulak, Thorburn, Driver, Grondin, and others to develop a design methodology that utilized the post- buckling capacity of web plates. It was found that, similar to shear in plate girders, the usefulness of a web plate is not limited to its buckling capacity. With boundary members 1 Senior Design Engineer, GFDS Engineers, 543 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94105 Paper No. 588