An Archetype Mid-Rise Building for Novel Complete Cold-Formed Steel Buildings

This paper introduces an archetype mid-rise cold-formed steel (CFS) building that aids in assessing the limits of current structural solutions, particularly lateral force resisting systems, and also in the development of new CFS technologies. A unified archetype building provides a platform for comparing the performance of new lateral force resisting systems to existing ones. The study herein provides quantitative evaluation of the design limitations of a typical “complete” cold-formed steel building (i.e. only cold-formed steel based elements are used for all gravity and lateral force resisting systems) at different heights (4 through 20 stories) located in a high seismic zone. The primary focus is the seismic force resisting system, which is limited to shear wall systems detailed in AISI specifications. The archetype buildings are designed using ASCE7-10 for all required loads and load combinations; and the CFS framing systems are designed utilizing AISI specifications, particularly AISI-400-15. Limitations in the application of current specifications for designing mid-rise cold-formed steel buildings are provided, and the potential for further studies discussed