A plastic-based model for in-plane shear strength of steel plate-concrete shear walls

The steel plate-concrete shear wall (SCSW) has great potential being used in nuclear facilities due to its high construction efficiency and excellent structural performance. Although it is not new, but only thirty-year history of study for application in nuclear facilities. Different from other ordinary structures, nuclear facilities are low-rise buildings consisting of squat shear walls, and the in-plane, out-of-plane shear capacity and their combination are of concern in design. Currently, several equations for evaluation of in-plane shear strength of SCSW element are put forward and some are adopted by design codes with some modification. However, these equations are established based on the elastic theory and do not consider the collaborative work of infilled concrete and steel plates in limit state from an overall perspective. From the ultimate limit design point of view in current design structural codes or standards, a new model for evaluating the in-plane shear strength of the SCSW element is derived based on the lower bound plastic limit theory and two of its simplified expressions are proposed for easy application. The accuracy of the proposed equations is verified by comparing the calculated results with 14 collected experimental results. In the end, a comparison between the proposed equations and those in codes AISC N690 and JEAG 4618 is conducted.