Seismic behaviour of lightweight steel drywall partitions: Preliminarily fragility analysis based on available data

Lightweight steel drywall partitions owing to their light weightiness, efficient erection process and superior environmental performances nowadays cover a wider proportion of partition wall systems building market. Their wider application in construction sector comes at an expense of their increased vulnerability to seismic hazard, which became the governing reason of many experimental studies on their seismic response. These studies relied on quasi static cyclic or shake table tests to characterizes the seismic response of lightweight steel drywall partitions and more importantly identified different damage states (DS) and associated fragility functions. The work presented herein compare the fragility functions developed for different damage states in various studies along with the experimental fragility function generated by authors themselves during their experiments. Different types of damages are identified and how the definition of these damages differed in various studies is illustrated. The fragility functions are compared in terms of Inter storey Drift Ratios (IDR) ranges, median drift values, and standard deviations of the lognormal distributions. The preliminary comparison presented in this study would assist in the better identification of different types of damages in partition walls and the association of them to different global damage states.