Study of seismic behavior of the steel plate shear walls with vertical and inclined stiffener

Steel shear wall is one of the most suitable common systems for the strength and stability of the structure against lateral loads. In this system, vertical boundary elements around the shear wall, in addition to being part of the lateral load-bearing system, are responsible for bearing the weight of the structure during and after the earthquake, and therefore in designing this system, the border elements are tried to be remained in the elastic state after complete yield of the web plate. Also, to provide uniform stress along the length and height of the wall, vertical and horizontal boundary elements must have high flexural stiffness. Code provisions in this case sometimes lead to the selection of non-economic sections in the beams and columns attached to the wall. In this study, in order to reduce the demand for vertical boundary elements attached to the wall and to make the design economical, vertical and inclined stiffeners are predicted inside the wall. These stiffeners direct the plastic deformations mainly into the wall and away from the columns. To evaluate and compare the behavior of the proposed model, 30 finite element models were studied under lateral monotonic and cyclic loading. The results show that the addition of stiffeners, in addition to increasing the stiffness and lateral resistance of the system, increases the ductility of the lateral bearing system and reduces the required flexural stiffness of horizontal boundary elements.