Strength of double skin steel-concrete composite walls

Double skin steel-concrete composite walls have been increasingly used in civil engineering applications. However, the advantages of these walls have not been fully recognized due to the lack of appropriate technical guidelines for capacity design. In this paper, the local buckling strength of steel plate were firstly reviewed in terms of specifications incorporated in several modern codes. A methodology to predict the strength of steel plate with restraint of both concrete and shear studs was proposed based on the explicit solution for local buckling of steel plate in composite shear walls subjected to uniform axial compression and with elastically rotational restraint at loaded and unloaded edges. The results were compared with various previous experimental data and good agreement was observed. Furthermore, the load carrying capacity of composite walls was derived from the superposition of the contribution of steel plate and concrete. The predicted values from the proposed equations, together with the resulted determined from modern codes, were compared with the experimental results. It was found that both the proposed method and JEAG 4618 offer reasonable predictions while AISC 360 and KEPIC-SNG always underestimate the actual values.