semi-supported steel plate shear wall with oblique sides

This paper presents a new configuration for semi-supported steel plate shear walls to increase their efficiency. for this purpose, the infill steel plate is proposed to be a trapezoidal shape instead of a rectangular one. to find the most efficient inclination angle of lateral sides, a numerical parametric study was conducted. five different values of inclination angle including 60, 75, 90, 105, and 120 degrees were considered. furthermore, two thicknesses of 1.75 and 2.00 mm were considered for the steel plate. the area of the steel plate was the same for all the models. the models were analyzed using finite element software abaqus. both geometric and material nonlinearity have been considered. to validate the finite element modeling, the available experimental results were used. according to the results, comparing to the wall with rectangular plate, the inclination angle of 60° increases the ultimate lateral strength and stiffness of the 1.75 mm-thick walls by 46% and 66%, respectively. furthermore, a simple approximate model is presented to calculate the load-deformation response of the proposed wall using sap 2000 program. despite the simplicity of the method, the results were in good agreement with the results of abaqus.