محمدرضا ماهینی

It's been ages since Shear walls gained reputation as a conventional load-resisting method through primary forms of reinforced concrete and later in various forms of steel structures or mixture of mentioned systems in buildings. Over the last four decades, reinforced concrete shear walls have been popularly used for lateral load-carrying purposes. But there had been growing concerns about local strength, ductility and efficient use of these systems in high rise steel structures especially in areas with higher risk of seismic activities. Knowing these were enough to shift the focus of researchers to innovate and design another generation of shear wall systems called steel plate shear wall (SPSW) from the 1970s. Concrete and steel shear walls brings structural and economical benefits despite their undeniable disadvantages. Reliability of concrete shear walls has been put into question owing to distribution of tensile cracks in areas under tensile stress and compressive failure under cyclic loadings. On the other hand, undesired and premature buckling of steel plates in diagonal compression areas decreases shear stiffness, strength and energy dissipation capacity of the system. Researchers' efforts in the course of time led to innovate another generation of shear walls called concrete stiffened steel plate shear wall (CSPSW) which is capable of covering SPSW and CSW point of weaknesses.The recently emerged system is susceptible of not only embracing the concurrent benefits of the mentioned systems but also elevating the efficiency of seismic performance by guarantying steel-concrete composite action. In a definition, Composite steel shear wall is an innovative lateral load-carrying system and consists of a steel plate with reinforced concrete cover in which the cover has been attached to its one side or both sides by shear connectors. In composite steel shear wall, reinforced concrete cover causes to increase shear capacity of steel shear wall up to in-plane shear yiel