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Seismic Performance Assessment of Wood-Frame Shear Wall Structures

Wood-frame shear wall structures are widely used for residential and commercial buildings. These buildings are lightweight, have very ductile connections and includes multiple load paths. The main objective of this dissertation is to evaluate the seismic performance of a wide range of wood-frame shear wall building designs under the influence of modeling and analysis parameter variations.

The first step towards the broad objective of seismic performance evaluation is to identify the different modeling and analysis parameters that can have a potential influence in the seismic response variations. The major variations considered in this study include level of critical damping, analytical modeling of damping, hysteresis model shape variations, ground motion characteristics, level of gravity loads, and floor acceleration variations. A subset of building model designs that were originally designed for the development of FEMA P-695 methodology is adapted for the numerical evaluations and a baseline for the variations is established.

To study the sensitivity of inherent damping in wood-frame shear wall structures, an extensive literature survey is completed to find the experimentally observed damping levels in these buildings. Later, nonlinear dynamic analysis is performed for the range of damping levels using different Rayleigh damping models. Ground motion scaling methods, source-to-site distance, and peak intensity levels are the selected variations in ground characteristic group. To assist with the ground motion scaling procedures, a computational toolkit is created to produce amplitude and spectrum matched ground motions for response history analysis. The particular hysteresis model CASHEW that is used for the wood-frame shear wall system has a specific load-displacement shape which is a function of the shear wall design. Three key parameters of this model are varied in a range of values that were observed during experimental tests and seismic performance responses are computed for this variations.

From the performance evaluations it is observed that the seismic response is quite sensitive to several of the modeling parameter variations and analysis variations mentioned above and has a unique response based on the design of the building. The range of performance variations for the different models are outlined in the chapters included in this dissertation. / Ph. D. / Wood-frame shear wall structures are widely used for residential and non-residential buildings worldwide. These buildings have several structural elements which can help the building to resist different load scenarios including wind effects, constant weights, and earthquake hazards. The primary aim of this dissertation is to identify the behavior of different designs of wood-frame shear wall buildings to earthquakes of different intensities through numerical modeling methods.

Analytical prediction of the response of a building to seismic hazards is influenced by several numerical modeling and analysis assumptions and specific characteristics of earthquakes that can occur at the building location. For a reliable prediction of the building response to earthquakes, it is important to study the sensitivity of various modeling assumptions that are considered in the development of numerical models of the buildings. With this objective, a wide range of woodframe building designs and configurations are selected in this dissertation. These building designs are converted to suitable numerical models using computational tools.

For evaluating the sensitivity of the modeling assumptions on the predicted behavior to potential earthquakes, a performance evaluation methodology – FEMA P-695 methodology is selected. This methodology outlines several computational methods which can be used to express the seismic response in terms of certain performance evaluation factors and probability distributions. The seismic responses that can be used in the development of the performance evaluation factors includes the displacement of the building from the original configuration, accelerations felt on the different floor levels, damage occurred on different components attached to the floors and walls of the building.

This dissertation identified the several possible sources of the modeling variations for a wide range of building designs and computed the FEMA P-695 performance evaluation factors. These factors are in turn used to access the sensitivity of the building performance to each of the modeling assumptions.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/84902
Date01 March 2017
CreatorsJayamon, Jeena Rachel
ContributorsCivil and Environmental Engineering, Charney, Finley A., Line, Philip, Eatherton, Matthew R., Koutromanos, Ioannis, Hindman, Daniel P.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
FormatETD, application/pdf, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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