Behaviour of a facade anchor system under simulated seismic load

In the past years a lot of improvement has been made on earthquake safety of buildings, however, although the loss of life has been minimized due to structural collapses, damage of non-structural elements is still an important topic. Such damage has major social or economical impact, particularly in critical buildings. Being the safety of these elements under seismic load attained by designing them for the forces transferred due to the element's inertia, security depends on the proper anchoring into the structural element. Hence, it is essential to safely design the connection for the expected actions during an earthquake event. Thus, the analysis of a fa cade cladding system is done using data stemming from tests performed on both single fasteners and on a test frame allowing an investigation of the behaviour of the system under a simulated dynamic load. This analysis is made for inplane movement which is expected to be the higher ampli ed vibration mode. Under a simpli ed dynamic analysis, a comparison between experimental data and code prescriptions is attained. It is shown that a behaviour factor of 1.5 may be more suitable for close to resonance states. Moreover, a study of the behaviour of anchors working in a group is made, allowing the conclusion that 50% of forces' redistribution is a reasonable estimation, for two fasteners with a sti ness ratio over 65%. It is also shown that for inplane vibration this redistribution may be negligible on the systems natural frequency.