Ahmad RAHMZADEH - Earthquake Eng ineering Graduate Student, School of Civil Engineering, College o f Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Mehdi GHASSEMIEH - Associate Professor, School of Civ il Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

The 6-story Olive View Medical Center in California and the 35-story Kobe City Hall tower, both of which showed good performance w hile withstanding earthquakes, are two examples of structures that were constructed using stiffened steel plate shear walls as a lateral load resisting systemm. Stiffeners are used in such lateral load resisting systems t o improve the buckling stability of the shear panel. However, using plate girder equations often leads to unec onomical and, in some cases, incorrect design of stiffeners due to major differences between plate girders an d steel plate shear walls (SPSWs).In this paper, the effect of the rigidity and arrangement of stiffeners on the buckling behavior of plates is studied using th e finite element method (FEM). Subsequently figures cover ing curves for the design of stiffeners in various practical configurations are presented.

Plate Buckling, Critical Shear Stress, Stiffener, Rigidity, Steel Plate Shear Wall