A novel lateral force resisting system, namely steel shear panels with Butterfly-Shaped (BS) links is proposed, which is a promising alternative for improving the buckling stability and seismic behaviour of conventional steel plate shear walls. To illustrate the advantages of such a device, specimens with different number of butterfly links have been numerically investigated. To this purpose, a FE model, which has been preliminary calibrated on conventional shear panels on the basis of recent experimental tests, has been defined. Then, the influence on the hysteretic performance of some non-dimensional ratios, which characterize the butterfly link geometry, namely the slenderness ratio and the taper ratio, is evaluated. In the whole, the results demonstrate that the shear strength, initial stiffness and dissipation energy are controlled by the number of butterfly shaped links. In addition, due to buckling phenomena of butterfly shaped links, the energy dissipation of shear panels with BS links may significantly decrease. For this reason, three different limit states are evaluated and specimens which have an improved cyclic behaviour in terms of energy dissipated are suggested.
