Seismic behaviour of sheathed CFS buildings: Shake table tests and numerical modelling

The objective of this paper is to describe the shake table tests and the numerical modelling of a cold-formed steel (CFS) building. The two-storey full scale building, named as ELISSA mock-up, was subjected to shake table tests at University of Naples “Federico II”, as a part of the European project Energy efficient LIghtweight-Sustainable-SAfe steel construction (ELISSA). The tests were performed at two phases of the building construction process. In the first phase, only structural part of mock-up was subjected to dynamic identification tests, while in the second phase, the architectonic nonstructural elements were added and the mock-up was tested under the action of natural earthquake input with the varying scaling factors. Test results showed that the investigated construction system has a good seismic performance, with very low inter-storey drifts and negligible damages. Moreover, the non-structural elements influenced greatly the seismic response of building. Furthermore, a numerical model was also developed for the experimental mock-up at both construction phases using the OpenSees software. Models were able to simulate with a good accuracy the nonlinear dynamic response of the whole building at both phases.