Validation of novel seismic design criteria for lightweight steel building in Europe

Lightweight Steel (LWS) buildings fabricated with cold-formed steel profiles are a viable alternative to traditional reinforced concrete or masonry buildings for low to mid-rise constructions. The current edition of Eurocode 8 does not provide seismic design guidelines for them in Europe. This paper presents a new seismic design criterion for these buildings, which is proposed to be added in the next edition of Eurocode 8. The criteria include design guidelines for lateral force resisting systems that are most common to LWS buildings. These systems include: CFS strap braced walls and CFS shear walls with steel sheets, wood, or gypsum sheathing. A brief overview of these guidelines and the relevant background information is provided in this paper. Then these guidelines are validated with a numerical study on several building archetypes. Archetypes are designed following the proposed seismic design criteria and analyzed under the suite of forty-four earthquake records. Archetypes are analyzed using both nonlinear pushover analysis and incremental dynamic analysis. Based on the analysis results, their collapse probability is gauged to judge the level of protection against seismic hazard provided by the proposed design criteria.