Small-scale, instructional shake tables, such as the UCIST shake table, are used at many colleges and universities to provide educational and research experiences in seismic behavior of structural systems. This paper describes the development of a physical model and associated educational materials that demonstrate the seismic behavior of shear walls used in cold-formed steel (CFS) building systems. Existing research has demonstrated that much of the non-linear behavior of the shear walls occurs due to the relative motion between the CFS frame and sheathing, which results in the fasteners progressively damaging the sheathing material. The shake table model consists of a hinged steel frame, a rigid sheathing panel, and fasteners surrounded by rubber bushings to provide sufficient relative motion between the frame and sheathing. The dynamic properties of the system can be varied by changing the number of fasteners, the stiffness of the rubber, and the mass of the model. The model can be excited with whitenoise, to characterize the frequency and damping, or with earthquake ground motions to study the effect of shear wall properties on the seismic response. A second type of sheathing panel, which is damaged by the fasteners, demonstrates the effect of accumulated damage on the dynamic response of the system. The physical models, along with companion computational tools in OpenSees and MATLAB, demonstrate that key aspects of the seismic behavior of CFS shear walls can be effectively reproduced in small-scale models for educational use.
