Design of wall diaphragms has been a topic of major discussions during the development of the European timber design code, Eurocode 5. The main problem has been that wall diaphragms are fastened to the substrate in different ways in different countries and that this fact must be reflected in the code. In the latest approved version of the code two parallel methods for design of wall diaphragms are given. The objective of this paper is to present a plastic method for design of wood-framed shear walls that can serve as a basis for a new unified method in the code. The proposed method is flexible with respect to load configurations and boundary conditions and can for example be applied on walls where the leading stud on the windward side is fully or partially anchored with respect to vertical uplift. The method can be used for design of walls with various geometric layouts including the influence of openings. Performed tests, presented elsewhere, show good agreement between measured and calculated load-carrying capacities. Some guidance on how the plastic design method can be transformed into code format is given.
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