Seismic performance and design theory of non-buckling steel shear walls with corrugated core panel

In this paper, a non-buckling corrugated core panel steel shear wall with good lateral stiffness and energy dissipating capacity is introduced. Premature buckling is prevented by fully taking advantage of inherent extra-large flexural stiffness and yielding is ensured before buckling. Firstly, the optimal corrugation configuration of the core panel was obtained by parametric investigation, including detailed dimensions of single wave such as thickness of core panel, depth of corrugation, angle of corrugation and so on. Height-to-thickness ratio, width-to-thickness and aspect ratio have also been taken into consideration. The parametric analysis proves that when the former two major factors are no larger than 177, 226 for wave 7, 10, respectively, unexpected buckling will not happen. Then, theoretical approaches to calculate yielding strength, ultimate strength and initial lateral stiffness have also been derived. Four specimens with two types of optimal corrugation configurations have been tested to testify above theory and configurations. The test results reveal that two specimens with larger height-to-thickness ratio and width-to-thickness ratio exceeding recommended limit exhibit inevitable buckling, while the other two with smaller ratios show ideal energy-absorbing capability and no evident buckling has been observed under drift ratio of 1/50. The test results agree with theoretical results quite well in terms of strength and initial stiffness. Finally, a simplified method of calculating the combined hardening rule was proposed and used for simulation. Parametric study of steel on seismic performance was hereafter conducted, which indicates that steel with large elongation percentage and small yielding strength is preferred. © 2020, Editorial Office of Journal of Building Structures. All right reserved.