Seismic design and performance of low energy dissipative CFS strap-braced stud walls

The seismic performance of cold formed steel (CFS) strap-braced stud walls was evaluated in previous tests by monotonic and cyclic tests on full-scale specimens designed according to the elastic approach. Even if an elastic seismic design approach was followed, based on the experimental results, these walls exhibited a low but not negligible energy dissipative behaviour. Therefore, the current paper is focused on the seismic performance evaluation of low energy dissipative CFS strap-braced stud walls. In particular, starting from the critical analysis of current seismic codes, the paper presents a procedure for the prediction of strength and stiffness according to design rules provided by EN 1993-1-3, which was used to design case studies. Then, a test-based evaluation of behaviour was performed and values of the behaviour factor from 1.52 to 3.61 were obtained for low energy dissipative CFS strap-braced structures.