Investigating the crack on the behavior of Steel Plate Shear Wall (SPSW) under lateral load

Experimental and numerical studies on Steel Plate Shear Wall (SPSW) and its successful performance under last earthquakes have introduced this system as a lateral bearing system. There are lots of unknown information about SPSW despite of numerous studies that have were done. The effect of crack on the SPSW behavior is one of unknowns about SPSW that due to its complicity in nonlinear analysis, it has not been evaluated comprehensively. Because of thin steel plate and inherent of welding, emerging of crack on SPSW is deniable. So, in this paper the effect of central and edge crack and their growth on the behavior of SPSW have been studied. Results showed that the central crack are more destructive than edge cracks. The crack with long length lead the SPSW to fracture in elastic zone. Due to difficulty of crack modeling and crack analysis, the necessary relations have been proposed to obtain pushover diagram that without FE modeling the proposed relation estimate the pushover diagram of system in good agreement with FE results.