Abstract - A steel plate shear wall (SPW) is a lateral-loadresisting

system
consisting
of
vertical steel plate infills connected
to the surrounding beams and columns and installed in one or
more bays along the full height of the structure to form a
cantilevered wall. SPSW subjected to cyclic inelastic
deformations exhibit high initial stiffness, behave in a very
ductile manner, and dissipate significant amounts of energy.
These characteristics make them suitable to resist seismic
loading.
The emergence of steel plate shear walls, both as a topic
of research and in actual construction, began in the early 1970's.
Most of the structures constmcted during this period that
employed steel shear walls were built in Japan and the United
States, and they were generally a substitute for conventional
reinforced concrete shear walls. As a result, the earliest research
came from Japan and the United States, the Japanese being the
first to study the overall behaviour of steel plate shear walls
[Takahashi et al., 19731. Prior to key research performed in the
1980s, the design approach used by the Japanese and Americans
concentrated on preventing the steel plate shear panels from
buckling prior to the attainment of shear yield. In Japan, this
was achieved by reinforcing the thin panels with a relatively

reinforced concrete. But now days Steel Plate Shear(SPSW) is employed in several structures in USA, Canada and
UK. Steel Plate Shear Wall system has relalarge energy dissipation capability, thus being very attrafor high risk
earthquake zones.The post bucking strengttension field action mechanism (as shown in Fig-1) harecognized as early
as in the 1930s in aerospace engin(Wagner, 1931), and as early as in the 1960s in steel buiconstruction, when it was
incorporated in to the process of plate girders ( Basler, 1961). The appropriaof post-bucking stiffness and strength
characteristics of to resist service lateral loads was analytically predictThorburn in (1983) and experimentally
confirmed by Tand Kulak (1983).
Research on unstiffened steel plate shear wallinvestigated the effect of simple versus rigid beam-to-cconnections on
the overall behavior ( Caccese et al., the dynamic response of steel plate shear (Sabouri_Ghomi and Roberts, 1992;
Rezai,1999), the eof holes in the infill plates ( Roberts and Sabouri-Ghomi