Bending behaviour of full-scale walls with light-gauge slotted steel studs subjected to distributed loading

Full-scale experiments were carried out to investigate the static responses of light-gauge slotted steel stud walls with different web heights subjected to uniformly distributed transverse loading. The failure modes for the walls were depicted. The influence of the web height on the static behaviour of this new kind of light-gauge steel stud walls was analyzed. By means of ABAQUS, finite element model was built to numerically investigate the bending behaviour of the full-scale light-gauge slotted steel stud walls. The analysis results were benchmarked against the experimental ones. It was concluded that the gypsum board can prevent the studs from overall buckling. The stud wall with web height of 150 mm failed in shear mode at the support and buckled in both the local and distortional mode at the mid span, while the stud wall with web height of 100 mm only failed with local and distortional buckling at the mid span. When there is no window hole, the slotted steel stud wall with a web height of 100 mm can resist the wind loading in China for the building with the height lower than 50 m.