Seismic Performance of Internal Partition Walls with Slotted and Bracketed Head-Tracks

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents the concept, design, construction and seismic performance assessment of internal partition walls with novel slotted and bracketed head-track details. In the slotted head-track walls, the anchors connecting the wall to the slab above are intended to slide within the slot to accommodate the desired in-plane drifts. On the other hand, in the bracketed head-track walls, the story-drift demands are accommodated by sliding of the bolt and flexing of the plastic brackets attached to the slots. In this paper, bi-directional behaviour of a novel flexible bracket is experimentally characterised and a number of wall sub-assemblies with the slotted and bracketed connection details are tested under quasi-static cyclic loading to investigate their seismic performance. The walls with slotted details showed the first signs of damage requiring repair at 0.78% drift. In contrast, when brackets were attached to the slots, the wall remained intact up to 4% drift, demonstrating a superior seismic resiliency.