Test, analysis, and design of ovally-perforated vertically-flexible steel plate shear wall (OVSPW)

A new type of steel plate shear wall (SPSW) with oval-curved architectural openings and vertically flexible horizontal connection elements is proposed. The vertical flexibility of the wall accommodates the construction settlement introduced by column contraction under the dead loads of the upper stories and allows sequential installation from the lower stories. A quasi-static cyclic loading test and finite element (FE) analysis verified the stable seismic behaviors of the ovally-perforated vertically-flexible steel plate shear wall (OVSPW). The results of FE parametric analysis showed that an OVSPW with an appropriate thickness of boundary elements effectively accommodated the construction settlement that could lead to large in-plane compression for a conventional SPSW. The horizontal connection elements made of steel tubes realized the vertical stiffness of OVSPW to less than 2% of the original value without changing the lateral stiffness. New design equations of the OVSPW were derived through integral and extreme value solutions to predict the mechanical behavior of OVSPW.