Influence of Sheathing-Fastener Connection Stiffness on the Design Strength of Cold-Formed Steel Wall Panels

This paper investigates the bracing effect of sheathing fastener connection on point-symmetric shaped cold formed steel (CFS) studs through full-scale laboratory tests. The test parameters include slenderness of the CFS stud, fastener connection spacing, and sheathing thickness. The test results indicate that the bracing effect of the particle cement board has significantly enhanced the moment capacity of the CFS stud, nevertheless, this was not completely captured by the current design specifications of American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI). The detailed discussion on the unsuitability of the current AISI design method in determining the design moment capacity and failure modes of the sheathed CFS wall stud is presented. In addition, the PCB-fastener connection demand check shows that the provided sheathing configurations are adequate to brace the CFS studs from biaxial bending, which is in contrast compared to the experimental results. Therefore, a new test setup is proposed to accurately determine the stiffness of the sheathing fastener connections to formulate a reliable design method.