Resumen:
Shear walls are the major components of the Lateral-Force-Resisting System (LFRS) in lightframe wood buildings. With the growing popularity of mid-rise prefabricated light-frame
wood construction, engineers need basic design information on the shear walls to design and
produce safe structures in case of high winds or earthquakes. The racking resistance of lightframe shear walls depends on many factors, including sheathing and hold-down devices and,
most importantly, sheathing-to-framing fastenings. While the performance of nailed shear
walls has been studied extensively, and design information is included in the design codes,
there is little information on stapled shear walls, especially in the US and Canada. The cost
of staples is significantly less than of equivalent nails; hence, the use of staples instead of
nails would allow cost savings in mass production if they provide sufficient resistance and
displacement capacity in the engineered shear walls. This thesis presents the results of a study
which was focused on the comparison of the performance of nailed and stapled shear walls
in laboratory tests under monotonic and cyclic loading in accordance with ASTM E564 and
E2126, respectively. Several series of tests were performed on 2.4-m (8-ft) square shear walls
with 11-mm (7/16-in) OSB sheathing with various hold-downs and various patterns of staples
and nails: 5-cm (2-in), 10-cm (4-in) and 15-cm (6-in) spacing and 19-mm and 10-mm
edge/end distances of connector. The staples were gauge 16: 50-mm (2-in) long with 11-mm
(7/16-in) crown. The nails were power-driven bright common steel wire nails gauge 8d: 63-
mm (2½-in) long with 2.87-mm (0.113-in) diameter. The main results revealed a similar
racking performance for stapled and nailed shear walls, in terms of initial stiffness, maximum
displacement, maximum load, equivalent stiffness and equivalent viscous damping ratio.
Moreover, the failure of the wall is a combination of different failure modes in the connectors
where the end/edge distance is important. Finally, the principal highlight for stapled shear
walls is the less splitting framing when the end/edge spacing fastener is 5-cm (2-in) from the
end/edge of the sheathing