Seismic Evaluation of Atypical Special Plate Shear Walls

The structure of a building undergoing a seismic reevaluation at the Idaho National Laboratory includes a number of steel plate walls and a roof liner which will act as shear diaphragms during an earthquake. Since the facility was designed and built long before such criteria were formulated, it is not surprising that these walls are not configured to meet all of the recently formulated requirements for such structures. To take advantage of these unusual structural elements, nonlinear analysis was used to ensure accurate modeling of the plate walls in a linear elastic seismic analysis of the full superstructure. The modeling was also used to establish the capacity of the plate.