Plate Zipping in Major Deformation of Rectangular and Square Shape Steel Shear Panels

Plate in steel plate shear walls has high capability for earthquake energy damping. The experimental investigations show that the plate zipping in corner and edge of plate causes damage and failure in steel plate shear walls. The main objective of this research is to prevent plate zipping with using four stiffeners at steel plate corners. For this reason, 24 rectangular steel plate shear walls and 24 square steel plate shear walls, with four stiffeners in edge of the plate as one-story frame and unite snap were modeled by ANSYS 15.0. Corner stiffeners have rectangular shapes. All samples are subject to 15% drift, which occurs gradually applied to samples. In this study, interaction plate and frame theory has been used to design the shear panel. Thickness of steel plate shear walls are 0.003, 0.005, 0.007 and 0.01 meter. To find the optimum height and thickness dimensions of stiffeners, 557 times of trial and error is done in the software. The results show that by putting above-mentioned stiffeners, plate zipping can prevented. According to von Mises stress values in rectangular and square steel shear walls, the optimum mode for stiffener length is 8.5% and 6% of plate steel length respectively, which can be considered the length of stiffener an average 7% of the steel plate length. In present research, the smaller dimensions of square steel plate shear wall than rectangular ones have obtained. The results also show, by increasing the thickness of the steel plate, because of the large dimensions of stiffeners von Mises stress in the corners of the plate is reduced. In square steel shear walls, the post buckling field, is diagonally created, and therefore its condition is more critical than the rectangular steel shear wall.