Behavior of steel plate shear walls with in-span plastic hinges

Research was conducted to investigate the seismic behavior of steel plate shear walls with in-span plastic hinges. Results show that the development of in-span plastic hinges has detrimental impacts on the behavior of the structure through inducing: (1) significant vertical and residual deformations on the HBEs (i.e. shakedown phenomenon); (2) only partial yielding of the infill plates; (3) lower global plastic strength compared to the values predicted by code equations; and (4) total HBE rotations greater than 0.03 radians after the structure was pushed cyclically up to a maximum lateral drift of 3%. Nonlinear time history analyses also demonstrated that the severity of the ground excitations accentuated the shakedown phenomenon.