Seismic Response and Engineering of Cold-formed Steel Framed Buildings

Abstract Buildings framed from cold-formed steel members are becoming increasingly common. Significant research has been conducted on individual cold-formed steel members, but little research has been done on full buildings framed from cold-formed steel. In the past, testing on individual shear walls has been used to provide insights and create safe seismic designs for cold-formed steel buildings, but understanding and modeling of whole buildings have been out of reach. As a result, seismic performance-based design has also remained out of reach for cold-formed steel framed buildings. Recently, a North American effort under the abbreviated name: CFS-NEES has begun to address this challenge head on. Major deliverables in the CFS-NEES effort included: shear wall testing, characterization, and modeling; cyclic member testing, characterization, and modeling; and, whole building shake table testing, and modeling. The research provides the necessary building blocks for developing efficient nonlinear time history models of buildings framed from cold-formed steel. In addition, the experiments demonstrate the large difference between idealized engineering models of the seismic force-resisting system and the superior performance of the full building system.