Experimental evaluation of CFS braced-truss shear wall under cyclic loading

Cold-formed steel (CFS) shear walls are widely used in many engineering practice owing to their superiorities such as light weight, better ductility and easy construction. This research is focused on the behaviour of a new CFS braced-truss shear wall system which is different in skeleton configuration compared to conventional CFS framed walls. A full scale test program was conducted on walls of four different configurations. The specimens’ maximum lateral load capacity, maximum deformation and failure modes of the system were investigated in this study in order to suggest improvements for future researches. The study showed that the performance of this kind of braced-truss CFS shear wall is satisfactory and using truss elements in the side span of the wall can cause higher strength compared to knee- and K-braced wall systems tested by the other researchers. In addition, application of diagonal members can decrease the chance of track and chord buckling