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Racking stiffness and strength of cold‐formed steel frames braced with adhesively bonded glass panels

In cold‐formed steel building construction, cold‐formed steel shear wall panels (CFSSWPs) are used as primary lateral load resisting components, that maintain the stability and the integrity of the structure. Traditionally, a CFSSWP consists of a cold‐formed steel frame with structural sheeting, such as oriented strand board (OSB), gypsum wall board (GWB), plywood or other, screwed onto it. These type of elements have some unique properties, such as high elastic stiffness, large displacement ductility, etc. On the other hand, as the studs are closely spaced – a value of 60 cm for the spacing is common – only small openings are present, hence transparency is limited. To increase the transparency of cold‐formed steel buildings, which is a tendency in contemporary architecture, load‐bearing capacities of glass can be utilised by bracing the frames with glass instead of traditional sheeting. The conventional two‐component structural silicone Sikasil® SG‐500 is considered for the load‐bearing cold‐formed steel‐glass connection. In this research, the racking behaviour of 1.5 m by 3.5 m cold‐formed steel frames onto which glass panels are circumferentially bonded on both sides is determined by means of experimental tests. This paper reports about the conducted experiments and the obtained data. From the tests, a value of 35.25±0.452 kN/m was obtained for the racking strength of the considered hybrid cold‐formed steel‐glass panels. A comparison with traditional CFSSWPs showed that the hybrid element can obtain similar racking strengths. Therefore, the study revealed the potential of hybrid cold‐formed steel‐glass elements using structural silicones to provide sufficient in‐plane lateral stiffness and strength.