Lateral performance of cold‐formed steel OSB‐sheathed stud wall panels

Oriented Strand Boards (OSB) are currently one the most widely used cladding options in cold‐formed steel (CFS) stud wall panels. The sheathing generates significant resistance to lateral loads owing to its diaphragm stiffness, which is however typically not fully exploited in design. This paper aims to investigate the lateral inplane behaviour of CFS OSB‐sheathed stud wall panels and provide insight into their failure mechanisms and seismic characteristics. Detailed finite element (FE) models of CFS OSB‐sheathed wall panels were developed, featuring material nonlinearity, detailed connection behaviour and geometric imperfections, and their accuracy was validated against previously conducted experiments. The validated FE models were then employed in a parametric study to investigate the effects of key design variables, including the OSB and CFS element thicknesses and the board configuration, on the structural performance parameters and seismic characteristics of the walls. The results demonstrate that using thinner OSB sheathing resulted in lower lateral strength, initial stiffness and energy dissipation, but increased the ductility and ultimate displacement by up to 40%. It was also shown that the presence of horizontal/vertical seams significantly reduces the lateral load capacity and initial stiffness.