Cyclic Simulation of Cold-Formed Steel Shear Walls with Corrugated Steel Sheathing

This paper presents cyclic finite element modeling and analysis on cold-formed steel framed shear walls sheathed by corrugated steel sheets. Full-scale shear wall tests on this type of shear wall system have been conducted and it was found that the corrugated sheathing had rigid board behavior before it failed in shear buckling in the sheathing and sometimes simultaneously in screw connection failures. The research goal of this presented work was to simulate the behavior and failure mechanism of such shear wall system in ABAQUS so that more complex shear wall systems can be analyzed numerically without full scale tests. The tiling and bearing behaviors of the screw connections in the sheathing was modeled in ABAQUS. Various connection modeling approaches in ABAQUS were studied in this paper and it was found that the SPRING2 element was capable of simulating the monotonic behavior of screw connections and therefore was recommended in shear wall modeling. For cyclic tests, the cold-formed steel shear wall experienced significant pinching behavior before the failure. It was suggested that a general user-defined element (user subroutine UEL) in ABAQUS could be used to simulate the screw behavior under cyclic loading. The research found that the ABAQUS models had good agreements with the shear wall tests. The modeling details and analysis results are presented in this paper.

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