Abstract：To study the seismic behavior of the short-limb composite shear wall with double steel plates and infill concrete, an one-bay, two and half-story and one-third scale specimen was tested under low reversed cyclic loading. The failure mechanism, hysteretic behavior, ductility, stiffness degradation and energy dissipation of this test specimen were evaluated. Test results show that hysteretic curves of the specimen are full, its deformability and energy-dissipation capacity are excellent, and its lateral stiffness is high. Under low reversed cyclic loading, the web yielded and went into plasticity firstly, followed by the flange of both ends of the coupling beam, the column foot, and the bottom of the shear wall. The tensile fracture of the flange of the coupling beam at the second floor resulted in the failure of specimen. The line rigidity of shear wall is obviously larger than that of coupling beam, and under horizontal loading, the moments at both ends of coupling beam are large, indicating that they shall be the weak parts of the structure. To prevent the damage of connection between beam and free edge of shear wall, the side columns around the free edge of shear wall could be arranged. At the peak load of specimen, its top drift reached 1/50. Additionally, the drift and energy dissipation for the first floor were less than those of the second floor. In the elastic stage and under the same lateral load, the shear strain at the web of coupling beam was the maximum, the normal strain at the foot of side column was relatively large, but the shear strain of the steel plate of shear wall was comparatively small. The FEM results using ABQUS agreed well with the test results.
