Enhancing Stiffness and/or Damping in Structural Systems with Cellular Shear Walls

Throughout the last decades, the idea of substituting conventional steel shear wall structural systems with perforated shear wall panels has been explored. Extending this concept, cellular shear wall systems have been proposed. Such systems demonstrate an enhanced dynamic behavior due to their lightweight properties and their ability to avoid out-of-plane buckling. The existing gaps within the body of the cellular shear wall system, allow for viscoelastic infills to be introduced, providing both stiffness and damping into the structural element. The purpose of this paper is to describe the performance of such cellular shear wall systems with viscoelastic fillers under dynamic loading. Considering the steel matrix of the shear wall system, two types of cell architectures are discussed: (a) 8hexagonal honeycomb cells and (b) chiral cells. A harmonic excitation is imposed on full-scaled shear wall panels of any of the previous cell types, with and without viscoelastic infills. The effectiveness of the proposed shear wall system is verified. Comparative results in terms of stress-strain curves provide better understanding of the proposed concept’s behavior.