Steel and Composite Shear Walls - Two High-Performance Lateral Force Resisting Systems

This keynote speech focuses on cyclic behavior and seismic design of steel and composite shear walls, two efficient and ductile lateral force resisting systems. First, a summary of types of steel shear walls and their seismic performance are presented. Then, recent advances on the unstiffened steel plate shear walls are discussed. Unstiffened steel plate shear walls have been studied, and their design procedures are currently in most seismic design codes. However, their use has been quite limited. The main reason is that in the current unstiffened steel plate shear walls, included in the seismic codes, such as the North American specifications and the Eurocode, quite large lateral forces are applied to the boundary columns creating significant bending moments in the columns. The other reason for reluctance in using the existing steel plate shear wall is the very high cost of the field-welded moment connections that are currently used in this system. The keynote speech will discuss innovative systems developed in recent years to eliminate both problems. The second part of the keynote speech will focus on the steel-concrete composite systems. Available cyclic tests are briefly summarized, and recent developments and innovative systems will be discussed.