For many years, there has been a player "waiting in the wings"-a player whose performance has been under-appreciated in spite of consistently good reviews. Once considered simply a lateral load-resisting system with treat potential, the steel plate shear wall concept is now rapidly gaining popularity with owners and consultants for consideration in building construction projects. The system is being recognized for its benefits in both new and rehabilitation work primarily in seismically active zones, although its high its high elastic stiffness is also desirable for resisting wind forces. Steel plate shear walls consist of steel plates one story high and one bay wide installed vertically within a building frame and connected to the surrounding beams and columns, a configuration which has been described as being analogous to a vertical cantilevered plate girder.After thirty years of research and development, the technical merit of the system is now difficult to deny. Although a multiplicity of forma have been studied, the particular configuration gradually emerging as providing the most desirable trade-off between technical performance and economics is the unstiffened thin-panel concept, pioneered by Kulak at the University of Alberta in the early 1980s. since that time and although research at the University of America and elsewhere have made significant contributions to the evolution of the system as we know it today.
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