NUMERICAL EVALUATION OF THE BEHAVIOUR FACTOR OF
LIGHTWEIGHT STEEL LATERAL FORCE RESISTING SYSTEMS
ACCORDING TO FEMA P695
Sarmad Shakeel, Luigi Fiorino, and Raffaele Landolfo
Department of Structures for Engineering and Architecture, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy
e-mail: sarmad.shakeel@unina.it
Abstract
Seismic design regulations rely on certain factors to reduce the earthquake actions due to in-
herent ductility and overstrength of the lateral force resisting systems. The behaviour factors
given in Eurocodes are one such example, which when applied during the design process will
ensure the life safety performance level of a building. Light-Weight Steel (LWS) structures fab-
ricated with Cold Formed Steel (CFS) profiles are increasingly widespread in earthquake
prone regions, however the current in practice edition of Eurocodes fails to acknowledge their
seismic performance by not providing behaviour factors for them. The study presented herein
addresses this issue by evaluating behaviour factor for the two commonly used LWS systems:
CFS strap braced walls and CFS shear walls with gypsum board sheathing through FEMA
P695 methodology. For each type of system, a set of archetypes, which represent a range of
design parameters and building configurations are designed following the capacity design ap-
proach and their response is idealized by nonlinear numerical models. The performance of
archetype models is evaluated systematically through the static pushover and the incremental
dynamic analysis under a suite of forty-four normalized and scaled earthquake records, repre-
senting the probable seismic hazard to the buildings. Finally, by calculating the collapse prob-
ability while also considering the uncertainties from various sources, the suitability of a trial
value of the behaviour factor used in the design phase of archetypes is evaluated. Based on the
results, it is concluded that a behaviour factor of 2.5 and 2.0 for CFS strap braced walls and
CFS shear walls with gypsum board sheathing is appropriate.
Keywords: Cold-formed steel, Shear walls, Gypsum board sheathing, Strap braced walls, Be-
haviour factor, FEMA P695
5825
COMPDYN 2019
7
th
ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on
Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering
M. Papadrakakis, M. Fragiadakis (eds.)
Crete, Greece, 24–26 June 2019
Available online at www.eccomasproceedia.org
Eccomas Proceedia COMPDYN (2019) 5825-5833
ISSN:2623-3347 © 2019 The Authors. Published by Eccomas Proceedia.
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of COMPDYN 2019.
doi: 10.7712/120119.7348.20812