Earthquake is an unexpected natural disaster threatening human’s lives and properties. Many seismic measures have been proposed to reduce its destructive results. One way is to install dampers in the specific part of structure for controlling the dynamic response [1–۶]. Another way is to optimize the current structural members to dissipate energy through the structure itself. The traditional reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall tends to develop tension cracks in the tension zones and crush in the localized compression areas during large cyclic excursions. Such cracks and crushing failures result in splitting and spalling failure of the wall with serious deterioration of stiffness and reduction in strength. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the traditional RC shear wall for better seismic performances. On the other hand, examples of very good behavior of traditional RC wall (when properly designed) under severe input ground motions are available in literature. A couple of examples are reported in [7,8]. With the development of urbanization, the need of high-rises leads to some other directions of optimization. Experimental results and numerical analysis indicate that the composition of steel and concrete has theoretical value and practical significance in bearing shear force [9–۱۳], hence the composite shear wall with steel plate and concrete is proposed. To be classified by the position of the steel plate, the composite shear wall has two categories, as shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1(a) and (b) shows composite walls whose steel plates are outside the concrete panel unilateral or bilateral. Researchers have carried out experiments on these kinds of walls and found that reinforced concrete shear walls with steel plate unilateral or bilateral both have excellent strength and ductility [14–۱۹]. However, they have drawbacks of easier buckling of steel plates, the construction difficulty of connection between wall and floor and the erosion of steel plates. To meet the needs of high-rise structures, steel plates can also be encased in the concrete, as shown in Fig. 1(c) and (d). The composite shear wall in Fig. 1(c) is a kind of precast shear wall. The steel frame and the steel plate are installed at the beginning, while the concrete panels are installed by bolts at the last phase of the construction [20]. In this kind of structure, the concrete panels are used only as the out-ofplane restraint, hence their material properties are not fully used. Moreover, their bolts and steel exposed in the air are easily destroyed because of fire or erosion.