Study of the Shear Behaviour of Floor Diaphragms in Light Steel Residential Buildings

Steel housing solutions made of thin-walled cold-formed profiles (CFS) appear to be very competitive in seismic areas due to their lightweight and the associated reduced mass. This non-negligible advantage associated with the competitive costs and the ease of erection made popular this type of building solution. Aimed at investigating the potential of these structural systems, in recent years, several extensive studies of the lateral response of shear walls were carried out. On the contrary, little attention was paid to the behavior of the floor diaphragms and on their contribuion to the overall building response. The University of Trento, in the framework of a wider re-search project aimed at the development of a residential building system made of CFS profiles, investigated the response of CFS floor systems subjected to in plane shear loading. Four types of floors characterized by two different beams systems and two different types of deck were tested in both monotonic and cyclic regime. Experimental results enabled the calibration of FE models simulating both the floor components and the whole floors. In this paper, the main features and outcomes of the tests and of the numerical analyses are presented and discussed.