Seismic performance assessment of a cold-formed steel building

In the scope of this thesis, lateral load bearing capacity of cold formed steel shear panel is investigated experimentally and analytically. In residential construction applications, cold formed steel frame is covered with various sheathings depending on its architectural and design purpose. The lateral load bearing capacity of the structure depends on sheathing type, screw spacing, screw type, cold formed steel element thickness, anchor type, anchor spacing and aspect ratio. Light steel structures, which are becoming more common day by day, force the countries to establish their own design standards. In this context, experiments have been carried out in Boğaziçi University Structural Laboratory to be used in the new earthquake speci cation. Force deformation relation were obtained in these experiments which were including different screw spacing and di erent steel thicknesses. This thesis aims to find a simple solution by eliminating this complexity. Based on the experimental results, an equivalent diagonal strut model was proposed to represent the effect of sheathing. This method, which was previously used in the modeling of reinforced concrete walls of RC building was used here for cold-formed steel panels. For equivalent diagonal strut, the thickness is important to represent lateral stiffness of the panel, and this thickness is proposed with an equation.However, this equation has only been proposed for this study, and the formula needs to be studied and developed in future studies. These panels were analyzed in SAP2000 program and it was observed that the results were convergent with the experimental results. This formula aims to provide ease of calculation by putting aside the complexity of explicit screws modeling modeling of sheathing between sheathing and steel. Performance analysis of a CFS building under seismic loading was conducted. It was also concluded that such structures were safe to be built in earthquake prone countries.