An official website of the United States government
Here’s how you know
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
Finite element analysis of the lateral capacity of cold-formed steel shear walls after fire exposure
Published
Author(s)
Shuna Ni, Xia Yan, Matthew Hoehler, Thomas Gernay
Abstract
Cold-formed-steel construction frequently relies on strap-braced, cold-formed-steel framed walls as the lateral-force resisting system. While the behavior of these walls has been studied during fire and under lateral loading separately, the influence of multi-hazard interactions – and particularly the effect of fire damage on walls' subsequent lateral load resistance – remains poorly understood. This paper presents a simulation procedure to analyze the thermal and structural response of cold-formed-steel walls when subjected sequentially to fire and lateral load, which is validated against full-scale experiments. The results indicate that the numerical model can capture the post-fire response of cold-formed steel walls, including lateral strength, stiffness, and ductile failure. The lateral behavior of the walls was found to depend primarily on the maximum temperature reached in the cold-formed steel members, and their resulting residual material properties. Then, the validated simulation procedure was used to estimate the residual lateral performance of a strap-braced wall after exposure to various high temperatures. For the residual strength of the cold-formed steel material, data collected from the literature was combined with new test data from the authors to study the effect of variability in material post-fire strength on the wall's response. The outcomes of this research will help engineers to determine the post-fire performance of a wall as a function of the severity of the fire event.
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology
Conference Dates
December 7-9, 2021
Conference Location
Brisbane, AU
Conference Title
AOSFST 2021 – 12th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology
Ni, S.
, Yan, X.
, Hoehler, M.
and Gernay, T.
(2021),
Finite element analysis of the lateral capacity of cold-formed steel shear walls after fire exposure, Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology, Brisbane, AU, [online], https://doi.org/10.14264/0825e72, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=933726
(Accessed September 27, 2023)