Open Collections

Seismic performance of post-and-beam wood buildings

University of British Columbia

This thesis presents a study to evaluate the seismic performance of post-and-beam (P&B) wood assemblies and buildings of Japanese style using computer modeling, experimental studies and probabilistic-based approaches. A numerical model called “PB3D” is proposed to predict the lateral response of the P&B buildings under static or dynamic loads. Special techniques are used to reduce the problem size and improve computational efficiency with reasonable prediction accuracy. This model simplifies a P&B building into a combination of 2D assemblies (e.g. shear walls, floor/roof diaphragms) while capturing the global structural responses of interest (e.g., inter-story drift and floor/roof acceleration). A mechanics-based wood shear wall model is implemented to represent the hysteretic properties of symmetric/nonsymmetric P&B walls. Roof/floor diaphragms are modeled as structural frames with calibrated equivalent diagonal braces in order to consider the influence of the diaphragm in-plane stiffness on the building performance. Experimental studies have been conducted to study the behavior of 2D assemblies and buildings. The engineering characteristics of single-brace P&B walls have been evaluated by monotonic and reversed cyclic tests. The contribution of additional gypsum wallboards to the wall lateral resistance has also been studied. An in-plane pushover test has been conducted to study the in-plane stiffness of a floor diaphragm. Two one-story P&B buildings have been tested under biaxial static loads and one-directional seismic loads, respectively. The established test database as well as a test database of a two-story P&B building provided by a research institute in Japan has been used to verify the “PB3D” model. Using the response surface method with importance sampling and considering the uncertainties involved in seismic ground motions, structural mass, and response surface fitting errors, seismic reliability analyses have been conducted to estimate the seismic reliabilities of a series of shear walls, a one-story building and a two-story building. System effect on the shear wall reliability has also been studied. The framework presented in this thesis provides a useful tool to assess the seismic performance of the P&B wood buildings and to aid the performance-based seismic design of these structural systems.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-04-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7570

Forestry

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/