Behavior of Single-Story Lightweight Panel Building Under Lateral Loads

Construction of lightweight structures is needed to reduce the earthquake effects on the buildings. Lightweight wall panels fabricated from polystyrene, steel, and shotcrete concrete are recently used in some countries such as USA and China to construct low-rise, lightweight buildings up to three stories. In the literature, there is no enough data on the behavior of this new panel building system during earthquakes. In this technical note, a half-scale model of a single-story building constructed in the laboratory using this panel materials and the same construction technique used in practice were tested under lateral loads. Although the lateral loads were increased to four times higher load levels than the design earthquake loads, only minor fine cracks have been observed on the surfaces. The technical note documents the details of the test program, including specimen properties, test setup, instrumentation, and test procedure. Test results and major observations are also presented and discussed.