Investigation of the Optimum Steel Shear Walls

During the last few decades, steel shear walls have been adopted as efficient lateral resisting systems for high rise structures and numerous researches have been conducted on their static and dynamic behavior. Steel shear walls have been utilized for retrofitting existing structures, as well as in design of new buildings in japan and USA. In this research, we have focused on the optimization of steel shear walls. Optimization in this research is to increase the proportion of lateral resistance to the weight of steel shear wall panels. For this purpose, three groups of steel shear walls (SSW) with length to height ratios of 5:3, 4:4 and 3:5 were selected. In each group, there was one un-stiffened panel and 5 stiffened walls. The patterns of stiffeners were different for 5 walls. All the SSWs were analyzed by pushover method using the ANSYS code. The analyses show that SSW without stiffener has the highest lateral resistance to weight ratio. Although adding stiffeners increase the lateral strength of the shear walls but decrease the lateral resistance to weight ratio. In this research optimum pattern of stiffeners is discussed and compared to other SSWs.