Domestic houses built of cold-formed steel (CFS) are typically supported laterally by wall panels that are made of braced steel studs. The behaviour of those panels under cyclic strain reversals in an earthquake is too complex to analyse and is best evaluated by physical experimentation. Dynamic testings of full scale wall specimens on a shaker table have been undertaken in previous studies but repeating those tests for different design configurations and base excitations can be very costly. This paper presents seismic performance behaviour of CFS wall panels based on monotonic, and cyclic, quasi-static tests followed by incremental dynamic analyses (IDA). Five accelerogram ensembles comprising artificial, and recorded, accelerograms, totalling 60 records, were employed for the non-linear time-history analyses of single-degree-of-freedom models the hysteretic behaviour of which had been calibrated to match with test results. Although IDA as a procedure has been around for a long time it has always been difficult to achieve reliable, and representative, correlations between Intensity and Damage to the structure
Loading protocols have been developed for quasi-static cyclic testing of structures and components. However, it is uncertain if protocols developed for conditions of intense ground shaking in regions of high seismicity would also be applicable to regions of low-moderate seismicity that are remote from the tectonic plate boundaries. This study presents a methodology for developing a quasi-static cyclic displacement loading protocol for experimental bracing evaluation of cold-formed steel stud shear walls. Simulations presented in the paper were based on conditions of moderate ground shaking (in Australia). The methodologies presented are generic in nature and can be applied to other regions of similar seismicity conditions (which include many parts of China, Korea, India and Malaysia). Numerous response time histories including both linear and nonlinear analyses have been generated for selected earthquake scenarios and site classes. Rain-flow cycle counting method has been used for determining the number of cycles at various ranges of normalized displacement amplitude. It is found that the number of displacement cycles of the loading protocol increases with increasing intensity of ground shaking (associated with a longer return period).
An important advancement in structural engineering in recent years has been the development of performance-based design (PBD). However, its application to cold-formed steel framed buildings remains largely unexplored. This paper presents the assessment of the bracing capacity of cold-formed steel stud bracing wall panels using a direct-displacement based design (DDBD) approach. The fundamentals of DDBD using equivalent damping, and inelastic displacement response spectra approaches are presented. These wall parameters needed for each approach are evaluated from experimental load-deflection response behaviour under quasi-static cyclic loading. Results obtained from the DDBD approach are compared with results from conventional non-linear time history analyses (NLTHA) to confirm the validity of the adopted approach. It is found that results estimated from DDBD method using inelastic displacement response spectra approach correlated much better with NLTHA results than the equivalent damping method.
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