Cold Formed Steel Panels for the Seismic Strengthening of Existing RC Buildings

In the last years, structural retrofit solutions for RC buildings have been studied and developed to meet the urgent need to renovate the existing building stock under multiple perspec- tives: seismic safety, architectural and comfort renovation, and thermal envelope enhancement. Cold-formed steel (CFS) panels could be used for this purpose among other strengthening solutions. This paper investigates the behavior of CFS panels used as seismic strengthening for existing RC buildings. Reduced complexity finite element models are used to numerically simulate the structural behavior of CFS panels; simplified analyses are carried out to derive useful indications about the applicability of these panels in strengthening RC buildings such as, for example, the panel stiffness and strength for varying the panel components. The applicability of CFS panels as a seismic retrofit solution for existing buildings not designed to withstand horizontal loads is herein preliminarily addressed through the application to a reference case study.