As a promising lateral force resisting system, Steel Plate Shear Walls (SPSW) have been widely used in new buildings as well as in retrofit of existing buildings since the early 1970s . It has demonstrated many advantages such as large elastic stiffness, stable hysteretic behavior and good energy dissipation capacity. But in case of severe earthquakes, steel plate shear walls may loss part of their stiffness and energy dissipation ability after buckling of the infill steel plate. A new kind of steel plate shear wall system, namely Buckling-Restrained Steel Plate shear Walls (BR-SPW), is put forward in this paper. This system is composed of the infill steel panel and the reinforced concrete slabs (RC slabs) on both sides. The RC slabs can restrain the buckling of the steel panel in out-of-plane so that the steel panel can reach full sectional yield stress without buckling. Meanwhile, the connection of the steel panel and reinforced concrete slabs can be deliberately designed to ensure their freely relative slide on the contact layer in case of strong ground motions. In this way, the concrete slabs can be protected from being crashed and the steel panel is prevented from buckling. Numerical studies presented reveal a good static behavior of BR-SPWs and some useful conclusions are presented.
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