Cheerleaders for steel buildings with modular composite plate-steel cores have found ways to simplify the novel system for high-rises. Design guidelines are coming out this year. And standards are coming in a couple of years.
At the heart of the system are “sandwich” panels of steel plate, joined by tie rods and field-filled with plain concrete. Recent research on seismic and wind behavior, co-sponsored primarily by the Charles Pankow Foundation and the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), has determined that tie-rod spacing can be 18 in. on center, rather than 12 in., say Michel Bruneau, director of the University at Buffalo’s seismic engineering laboratory, and his co-lead researcher Amit Varma, director of Purdue University’s engineering lab.“We both demonstrated that these walls can sustain inelastic deformations in a ductile way,” Bruneau says.