Flexural behavior of beams in steel plate shear walls

Steel plate shear wall (SPSW) system has been increasingly used for lateral loads resisting system since 1980s when the utilization of post-buckling strength of SPSW was realized. The structural response of SPSWs largely depends on the behavior of the surrounded beams. The beams are normally required to behave in the elastic region when the SPSW fully buckled and formed the tension field action. However, most modern design codes do not specify how this requirement can be achieved. This paper presents theoretical investigation and design procedures of manually calculating the plastic flexural capacity of the beams of SPSWs and can be considered as an extension to the previous work by Qu and Bruneau (2011). The reduction in the plastic flexural capacity of beam was considered to account for the presence of shear stress that was altered towards flanges at the boundary region, which can be explained by Saint-Venant