Reversed Cyclic Performance of Shear Walls with Wood Panels Attached to Cold-Formed Steel with Pins

Abstract

Screws are the only fasteners approved in the 2006 International Building Code for attaching wood structural sheathing to cold-formed steel framing for shear walls. Steel pins also provide an effective and efficient means of attaching wood structural sheathing. However, the proprietary nature of steel pins, coupled with the need to demonstrate equivalent performance to code-approved elements, necessarily requires manufacturers to consider some form of reversed cyclic testing to justify shear wall values for seismic design. This paper presents the results of an experimental program that evaluated the performance of wood panel sheathed cold-formed steel frame shear walls in which the wood panels were attached using one type of pneumatically driven steel pins. For the assemblies tested and the specific pin type used, several useful performance characteristics and characteristic values were identified to facilitate overall performance comparisons with other types of shear wall configurations. It is shown that the average ratio of the peak strength to the derived allowable strength exceeded 2.8, the average maximum usable displacement exceeded 3.5% of the wall height, the average ratio of the peak strength displacement to the allowable strength displacement exceeded 9.3, and the average maximum usable displacement was 35% greater than the peak strength displacement.