A thin rectangular steel wall in a steel shear wall structure always simultaneously sustains the lateral load and the gravity load. The gravity load can affect the shear strength of a steel shear wall. However, this effect is not considered in most of the research and standards, which may lead to potential danger in practice. From the previous study of the authors, the shear strength reduction was not only influenced by the load magnitude but also by the vertical stress distribution. For a simply-supported thick square wall, i.e. width to thickness ratio smaller than 100, the stress distribution can be accurately described in a cosine form. However, for a thin wall under compression and in-plane bending, the cosine distribution will largely overestimate the vertical stress, especially when the walls enter the post-buckling condition. To narrow the knowledge gap, this paper proposed a vertical stress distribution in a three-segment form, i.e. in both edge-segments, a combination of linear and cosine functions from the edge stresses to the minimum stress, while in the middle segment, the stress distribution is constant and equal to the minimum stress. Two strategies, i.e. effective width method and Bedair’s method, are chosen to determine the width of the edge portion. A finite element model (FEM) is developed to evaluate the proposed distribution. The FEM has been verified using the results of our own experiments and tests done by Zaraś et al. The results show that the proposed three-segment stress distribution can well describe the behavior of thin walls of different slendernesses and stress gradients. The cosine distribution obtained from theoretical solution and the effective width model by Bedair are also discussed.

中文翻译：

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薄矩形钢壁受压平面内弯曲的竖向应力分布

钢剪力墙结构中的薄矩形钢墙总是同时承受横向荷载和重力荷载。重力荷载会影响钢剪力墙的抗剪强度。但是，大多数研究和标准都没有考虑到这种影响，这可能会导致实践中的潜在危险。从作者之前的研究来看，剪切强度的降低不仅受荷载大小的影响，还受垂直应力分布的影响。对于简支厚方墙，即宽厚比小于100，应力分布可以用余弦形式准确描述。然而，对于受压和面内弯曲的薄壁，余弦分布将大大高估垂直应力，特别是当壁进入后屈曲状态时。为了缩小知识差距，本文提出了一种三段形式的垂直应力分布，即在两个边缘段，从边缘应力到最小应力的线性和余弦函数的组合，而在中间段，应力分布是恒定的，等于最小应力。选择两种策略，即有效宽度法和Bedair 法来确定边缘部分的宽度。开发了有限元模型 (FEM) 来评估建议的分布。FEM 已经使用我们自己的实验结果和 Zaraś 等人所做的测试得到了验证。结果表明，所提出的三段应力分布可以很好地描述不同细长和应力梯度的薄壁行为。