Evaluation of steel plate shear walls based on performance based plastic design

The steel plate shear wall (SPSW) system has emerged as a promising lateral load resisting system in recent years. However, seismic code provisions for these systems are still based on elastic force- based design methodologies. Considering the ever increasing demands of efficient and reliable design procedures, a shift towards performance based plastic design (PBPD) procedure is proposed in this work. The proposed PBPD procedure for SPSW systems is based on a target inelastic drift and pre-selected yield mechanism. The proposed procedure is tested on a four-story building with rigid connections. Three different designs are considered: (1) the code design (2) the DBE design and (3) the MCE design. In addition, the displacement profiles and the selected yield mechanism are also compared at target drift.