Construction and Experimental Seismic Performance of a Full-scale Six-story Light-frame Wood Building

Abstract

In July 2009 a full-scale mid-rise light-frame wood apartment building was subjected to a series of earthquakes at the world's largest shake table in Miki, Japan. This paper focuses on (1) the design and construction of this 1350 m2 fullscale building, and (2) the performance of the building at three different ground motion intensities. The test results of the six-story light-frame wood building are examined in detail. The objectives of the testing program were to (1) demonstrate that the performance-based seismic design procedure developed as part of the U.S.-based NEESWood project worked on the full scale building, i.e. validate the design philosophy to the extent one test can; and (2) gain a better understanding of how mid-rise light-frame wood buildings respond, in general, to a major earthquake while providing a landmark data set to the seismic engineering research community. The building consisted of 1350m2 of living space and had twenty-three apartment units; approximately half one-bedroom units and half two-bedroom units.The building was subjected to three earthquakes ranging from seismic intensities corresponding to the 72 year event to the 2500 year event for Los Angeles, CA. In this paper the construction of the NEESWood Capstone Building is explained and the resulting seismic response in terms of base shears, selected wall drifts, global inter-story drifts, accelerations, hold-down forces, and roof drifts are presented. Detailed damage inspection was performed following each test and those results will be summarized also. The building performed excellently with little damage even following the 2500 year earthquake. The global drift at roof level was approximately 0.25 meters and maximum inter-story drifts were approximately 2% for the floor average with individual wall drifts reaching just over 3% in one corner of the building at the fifth story.