Seismic performance assessment of buildings with cold-formed steel shear wall panels

Presented in this paper is a method for seismic performance assessment of cold-formed steel buildings built with shear wall panels as the lateral load resisting system. In the proposed method, performance-based design philosophy is adopted to assess the seismic performance for the cold-formed steel framing system. The structural responses of cold-formed steel buildings are obtained from a simplified finite element based on pushover analysis developed in this study with accounting for the nonlinear behaviour of shear wall panels. A practical example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results from the proposed method are compared to results obtained from the conventional analysis. Issues associated with performance-based design of cold-formed steel buildings are discussed.