Flexural behavior of beams in steel plate shear walls

Steel plate shear wall (SPSW) system has been increasingly used for lateral loads resisting system since 1980s when the utilization of post-buckling strength of SPSW was realized. The structural response of SPSWs largely depends on the behavior of the surrounded beams. The beams are normally required to behave in the elastic region when the SPSW fully buckled and formed the tension field action. However, most modern design codes do not specify how this requirement can be achieved. This paper presents theoretical investigation and design procedures of manually calculating the plastic flexural capacity of the beams of SPSWs and can be considered as an extension to the previous work by Qu and Bruneau (2011). The reduction in the plastic flexural capacity of beam was considered to account for the presence of shear stress that was altered towards flanges at the boundary region, which can be explained by Saint-Venant's principle. The reduction in beam web was introduced and modified based on the research by Qu and Bruneau (2011), while the shear stress in the web in this research is excluded due to the boundary effect. The plastic flexural capacity of the beams is given by the superposition of the contributions from the flanges and the web. The developed equations are capable of predicting the plastic moment of the beams subjected to combined shear force, axial force, bending moment, and tension fields induced by yielded infill panels. Good agreement was found between the theoretical results and the data from previous research for flexural capacity of beams.