Steel plate shear walls have traditionally been perceived to be suitable mainly for high seismic regions due to their great ductility and cyclic energy dissipation capacity. Therefore, design and detailing requirements have become increasingly onerous in an attempt to maximize their performance, effectively making the system uneconomical in other regions. Developing applications specifically for low and moderate seismic regions has largely been neglected by researchers. Moreover, despite unique advantages of the system in terms of inherent high ductility and redundancy, its performance under accidental blast has not been investigated systematically. The objective of this research is to examine these neglected areas.;large-scale two-story steel plate shear wall test specimen was designed based on the efficient details for the limited-ductility performance application and tested under gravity load concurrent with cyclic lateral loads. The test results are used to assess its overall seismic performance and verify the efficiency of the proposed design philosophy and selected details. The specimen, overall and in its details, showed excellent performance with high ductility.;The nature of the infill plate forces applied to the boundary frame members is discussed in detail, and the reasons for achieving conservative column design forces in current capacity design methods are described. A performance-based capacity design method for the wall system is proposed and the target performance level is defined in terms of ductility and redundancy. Based on new and previous experimental data, a holistic and sound set of principles for capacity design of steel plate shear walls for three different performance levels--- including limited-ductility, moderately ductile, and ductile---along with their design provisions, are developed. The method is applied to design examples and verified against experimental results.;Another objective of this research was to explore the possible application of steel plate shear walls as a protective structure in industrial plants. Advanced and comprehensive numerical models that take into account important issues affecting the blast design are developed. The blast performance of the system is investigated by means of iso-response curves for both in-plane and out-of-plane blast orientations and different response parameters. An analytical normalization method is proposed that produces dimensionless iso-response curves.;Different practical details are investigated to reduce the force demands on the boundary frame of the wall system and ultimately reduce the construction cost in low seismic regions. A seismic zone-independent performance-based design method is developed and the efficiency of each detail is studied using comprehensive finite element simulations. It was found that suitable details for low seismic applications include simple beam-to-column connections, modular construction, and adopting a more liberal design philosophy for the columns.
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