Capacity curves of designed 10- and 15-storey wood buildings under seismic excitations

Mass timber products or wood composites, such as glulam or cross laminated timber (CLT), are not presently commonly used construction materials for mid-rise and high-rise buildings in North America. However, because of the potential environmental benefits of wood and the advances in wood technology and manufacturing, the feasibility of using timber materials construct mid- and high-rise buildings is under extensive investigation. One of the issues that needs to be addressed for the use of heavy timber material is related to the safety of such construction under seismic loading, which is investigated in this study. For the investigation, a 10- and a 15-story building with CLT are designed and considered. The 3-D finite element models of the buildings with nonlinear connections are developed. An assessment of the capacity curve of designed buildings under uni-directional seismic exactions is carried out based on nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis (IDA). The assessment also investigates the impact of .record-to-record variability on the capacity curves. Moreover, the estimated capacity curves are compared to those estimated using the nonlinear static pushover analyses. The comparison indicates that the capacity curve obtained from the nonlinear static pushover analysis can be used to adequately represent the average capacity curve estimated from the IDA curves for the designed timber buildings with nonlinear connections under seismic loadings.