Impact of construction details on OSB-sheathed cold-formed steel framed shear walls

The objective of this paper is to explore and characterize the impact of practical construction details on the cyclic performance of cold-formed steel framed shear walls sheathed with Oriented Strand Board. The specific construction details explored are motivated from a two-story, ledger-framed, cold-formed steel archetype building that is the focus of a larger effort to advance seismic performance-design for light steel frame construction. This larger effort in cold-formed steel (CFS) research is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation - Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NSF-NEES) effort and is known as the CFS-NEES project. The archetype structure is known as the CFS-NEES building. Shear walls in real construction, such as the CFS-NEES building, have details that differ from shear walls tested and provided for strength prediction in standards such as AISI-S213. Key differences include: (a) ledger (rim track) members attached across the interior face of the studs; (b) OSB panel seams, both horizontal and vertical, may not be aligned with the chord studs or only blocked with strap; (c) interior gypsum board is in place; (d) field studs may have a different thickness or grade from the chord studs; and other differences. In this work, these highlighted differences (a-d) are specifically explored in a series of shear wall tests loaded via cyclic (CUREE) protocols to determine their hysteretic performance. The test results are compared with AISI-S213 and hysteretic material characterizations utilizing an elastic-plastic model and a model capable of exhibiting pinching in the hysteretic loops. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.