Seismic Performance of Internal Partition Walls with Slotted and Bracketed Head-Tracks

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the concept, design, construction and seismic performance assessment of internal partition walls with novel slotted and bracketed head-track details. In the slotted head-track walls, the anchors connecting the wall to the slab above are intended to slide within the slot to accommodate the desired in-plane drifts. On the other hand, in the bracketed head-track walls, the story-drift demands are accommodated by sliding of the bolt and flexing of the plastic brackets attached to the slots. In this paper, bi-directional behaviour of a novel flexible bracket is experimentally characterised and a number of wall sub-assemblies with the slotted and bracketed connection details are tested under quasi-static cyclic loading to investigate their seismic performance. The walls with slotted details showed the first signs of damage requiring repair at 0.78% drift. In contrast, when brackets were attached to the slots, the wall remained intact up to 4% drift, demonstrating a superior seismic resiliency.

KEYWORDS:

• Low-damage system
• internal partition walls
• slotted head track
• Flexibracket system
• seismic resilience

Acknowledgements

The work presented in this paper has been partly sponsored in-kind through the supply of materials by Traxx Metal Framing Systems, FRAMECAD, and Winstone Wallboards Ltd (GIB). Gratitude is expressed for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).