Experimental study on the hysteretic behavior of steel plate shear wall with unequal length slits

A steel plate shear wall with slits (SPSWS) is an effective anti-seismic component element, which owns good ductility and energy dissipation capacity. The infill steel plate is divided into flexural links by slits, which changes the path of conducting force. As a result, the SPSWSs obtain higher energy dissipation capacity and better ductility compared with conventional steel plate shear walls. However, both tests and finite element method (FEM) analysis have shown that the slits lower the ultimate bearing capacity and the lateral stiffness of the steel plate shear wall. In this case, two steel plate shear walls with unequal length slits (SPSWUS), i.e. papilionaceous SPSWUS and fusiform SPSWUS, are proposed and analyzed in this paper. Four 1/3-scaled test specimens are designed for the experimental study. Two of the specimens are SPSWUSs, and the other two are traditional SPSWSs. Testing of the systems were performed under cyclic lateral loading. Results show that SPSWUS has rather high energy dissipation capacity and good ductility as well as relatively high lateral stiffness and ultimate bearing capacity when compared with the traditional SPSWS. Experimental results correlate well with those from the finite element analysis, which validates the finite element model.