Chen, Weichung

Vertical Motion Effects on Suspended Ceilings

Abstract eng:
Past earthquakes have shown widespread damage to the suspended ceilings. Despite their frequent use in Taiwan, many suspended ceilings experienced damage in earthquakes owing to the lacked proper seismic design or efficient installation. In 2011, Taiwan Building Code issued the seismic installation of the suspended ceiling systems which are similar to the ASTM E580-09. However, the construction of the lateral bracing assembly has always been a difficult challenge. Problems include slack installation or omission of the bracing wires due to obstructions result in uneven quality of the bracing system in-situ. In recent years, some researches have demonstrated that the lateral bracing assembly may not adequately resist the lateral force. The other researches have even shown that unbraced ceiling systems may perform well when providing both sufficient clearance and wide closure. Therefore, there is an increasing concern about the necessity of the bracing system. In order to understand the dynamic behavior of bracing systems of the suspended ceilings, full scale shaking table experiments of suspended ceiling systems were conducted in this study. The first series of experiments on 5.7m × 2.7m ceiling systems looked into the seismic effects of the bracing assemblies. Some ceiling specimens were subjected to unidirectional ground motions while the others were subjected to a horizontal and a vertical ground motions acting together. The results clearly showed that the bracing wire bore only a small portion of the inertial force, and this situation became more obvious while the ceiling systems were subjected to vertical excitations. The second series of experiments on 5.7m × 2.7m ceiling systems compared the seismic performance of the braced and unbraced ceilings. The preliminary observations revealed that the use of the lateral bracing including compression post may not improve the seismic performance of the ceiling system. The unbraced ceiling systems performed well just as the braced ceiling systems when excited only by horizontal ground motions, and it performed better when the vertical ground motions were added to the ceiling systems.

Contributors:

Yao, George

Conference Title:

Proceedings of the 16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Conference Title:

16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Conference Venue:

Santiago (CL)

Conference Dates:

2017-01-09 / 2017-01-13

Rights:

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