STRENGTHENING STEEL SHEAR WALL AFTER OPENING CREATION

In recent years, structures are becoming taller, and high stiness lateral load resisting systems are needed. Therefore, more attention has been paid to shear walls. In this paper, steel plate shear walls are investigated, which are appropriate in terms of construction speed, cost, high initial stiness, strength and ductility. A feature of these walls is the capability of being able to create an opening at any location of the wall, due to architectural demands, and some equations have been proposed for estimating the eect of these openings on wall behavior. In this study, the behavior of one-story walls due to monotonic loading has been investigated. At rst, we tend to nd more complete relations for sti- ness and strength reduction. So, walls with moment resisting frames, with minimum stiness of the boundary elements of the panel (based on AISC's recommended equation), with 8 dierent thicknesses for the plate, 5 dierent panel aspect ratios and 5 dierent opening percentages (square opening in the middle of the panel) that have been modeled in nite element software, Abaqus, and relations for estimating stiness and strength reduction due to that opening are proposed. The other purpose of this research is to present a method for strengthening these walls to reach the stiness and strength of walls without openings after creating the opening; which is mandatory when we decide to create it after its design and construction. So, walls with variable panel openings and dimensions, modeled in software, and their eects, were investigated. It can be concluded from the results that in the case of strengthening a wall with an opening based on the recommended method in this research, the existence of the opening can be ignored and conventional modeling methods for walls without openings can be used. These results are based on monotonic loading of onestory walls, but the cyclic behavior of walls and the eect of moments resulted from multiple stories need further study.