Keywords: steel shear walls, dynamic, reinforced concrete buildings, modeling.

The strengthening of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings using steel plate shear walls instead of RC shear walls is a very efficient and attractive structural system. Experimental research and construction practice certify that using steel shear walls in highly seismic regions such as California and Japan greatly enhances the structural response of buildings mainly lateral load resistance, stiffness, energy dissipation and ductility. The use of such structural system in the Middle East, for example Lebanon, is still uncommon although this region of the world is seismically active and has suffered severe damage in recent decades caused by disastrous earthquakes. The objective of this paper is to present the main advantages and design guides for steel plate shear wall and to compare RC shear walls and steel shear walls by inspecting the response of a prototype medium-rise building comprised of eight stories and having a typical rectangular plan area of 450 m² and a total height of 28 m. Components of the steel shear wall are designed based on AISC (1999) design provisions, where a non-compact steel plate wall with relatively high slenderness ratio is selected mainly to reduce the construction cost and time especially when using shop-welded field-bolted steel elements. The main contribution of this paper is the use of three dimensional structural models, developed using the structural analysis program ETABS, for the building of either RC shear walls or steel shear walls. The models were analyzed under gravity loads and time-history dynamic loads using the latest Izmit (Turkey) earthquake record with a peak ground acceleration of 0.3g corresponding to 300 cm/sec². The analytical results of the two buildings are interpreted showing that the storey-shear forces and the base shear in the building with steel shear plates are 12% less than those in the building with RC shear walls. This reduction is related to the thin thickness of the steel plate wall compared to that of the RC shear wall. Besides, the elastic drifts obtained using ETABS are transformed into inelastic drifts using a UBC Equation. The inelastic drifts for the steel shear walls are less than those in the building with RC walls by 15%. This reduction in the inelastic drift is mainly due to the difference in the stiffness properties between the two types of shear walls, where the rigidity (EI) of the RC shear wall is less than that of steel shear wall because of concrete cracking and lower modulus of elasticity. Accordingly, it is verified that the stiffness of the building with steel shear walls is higher although the natural periods of both buildings are almost equal.

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