Evaluating the effects of distance between bolts on the behavior of composite steel shear wall

Composite steel shear wall is a lateral load resisting system that consists of steel plate as a primary component with concrete wall (cover) attached to one side or both sides of the plate to prevent it from elastic buckling. The composite action of the system is ensured by using high-strength bolts. This paper investigates the effects of the distance between bolts on the behavior of the system. For this purpose, 14 one story one bay specimens with various distances between bolts were modeled and analyzed in the finite element software ABAQUS. To verify the ability of the model, numerical results were compared with a valid experiment, which shows very good agreement. Results demonstrate that increasing distance between bolts would improve the seismic behavior of the system. However, this increase in distance should be limited, since permission to widespread buckling of steel plate in free subpanels between bolts would result in no more improvement of the behavior. By comparing the results in elastic region, it was clearly observed that the initial stiffness of the system is not affected by changing the distance between bolts.