Seismic assessment of cold-formed steel stud bracing wall panels using direct displacement based design approach

Abstract

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.