Seismic Performance Monitoring and Identification of Steel Storage Pallet Racks

Steel storage pallet racks are framed steel structures commonly used in the logistic field. According to the European practice, they are built with cold-formed steel profiles. Vertical and horizontal elements are connected with mechanical joints and special elements are used for the base connections. The design of these structures is usually performed by adopting the ‘design by testing’ approach. This procedure asks for the experimental characterization of the main racks components and sub-assemblies, which allows identifying the parameters needed for the safety checks and the development of reliable FE models. Recent seismic events clearly showed the need for improvements in the knowledge of the seismic response not only of the components but also of the whole structure. As a contribution to this topic, an experimental study of the seismic response of full-scale rack frames is currently in progress. At this aim, a testing set-up for full-scale structures, with a maximum height of 22 m, was designed and realized. In this paper, the main features of the experimental set-up and the results of two push-over tests on a commercial two-bay four-level pallet rack are described and discussed. Finally, the results of FE analyses are presented.