Advisor
Simos Gerasimidis
Publication Date
2019
Abstract
As cold-formed steel (CFS) has increasingly been used in low- and mid-rise construction across United States, it becomes necessary to capture and evaluate its lateral response in both, sub-system/member level and system level. The main lateral resisting system in cold-formed steel construction is shear walls; shear walls are the focus of this work. In particular, the present study aims to shed light on the response of wood sheathed coldformed steel (CFS) shear walls exposed to earthquake events through nonlinear high fidelity fastener-based modeling. The numerical approach is fastener-oriented including nonlinear experimental-determined connector elements for steel-to-sheathing connections, orthotropic oriented strand board (OSB) modeling for sheathing material, contact implementation and linear spring hold-down simulation for preventing uplift. The numerical results are compared and validated by a previous experimental study, assessing the efficiency of fastener-based modeling to capture the peak load and displacement, the failure mechanisms and the overall structural behavior of sheathed cold-formed steel shear walls. Furthermore, cold-formed steel to sheathing shear fastener response is computationally examined and validated by a previous experimental work. The main goal of this work is to introduce a robust computational tool capable of demonstrating how wood sheathed cold-formed steel framed shear walls behave during a lateral load event with potential use in any cold-formed steel screw-fastened connection system, such as diaphragms and in any fastener-based cold-formed steel full building simulation.