Seismic characterisation of aluminium fusible links in single‐storey steel buildings

This work is part of the European RFCS “FISHWALL” project entitled “Fire and Seismic performances of hybrid fire walls in case of single‐storey industrial and commercial steel buildings”. The aim of the project is to design a hybrid firewall solution using sandwich panels for single‐storey buildings connected with the unprotected steel structure by means of fusible links, made of aluminium bolts. In this respect, the paper shows the results of preliminary numerical analyses performed on existing case studies of single‐storey steel buildings located in low and moderate seismicity zones and they were used: i) to estimate the seismic forces acting on the fusible links and ii) to subsequently design the specimens to be tested in the laboratory. In this respect, several finite elements models were developed in order to consider the widest range of configurations of the firewall with respect to the direction of the portal frame composing the steel buildings, i.e. firewall parallel and orthogonal to the portal frames. Based on the estimated forces, the design of the six different specimens was performed and it is thoroughly shown in the paper.