The existing codes and design guidelines for steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) fail to utilise the excellent ductility capacity of SPSW systems to its fullest extent, because these methods do not consider the inelastic displacement demand or ductility demand as their design objective. A performance-based plastic design method for SPSW systems with rigid beam-to-column connections is proposed in this work, which sets a specific ductility demand and a preferred yield mechanism as its performance targets. The effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving these targets is illustrated through sample case studies of four- and eight-storey SPSW systems for varied design scenarios. A comparison with the existing AISC method for the same design scenario shows that the proposed method consistently performs better, in achieving these performance-based targets. The proposed method is modified to account for P-Delta effects, wherever necessary. This modified method is found to be more effective than the original proposal, whenever P-Delta effects are significant.
