Effect of column root connections on the dynamic behavior of Chuandou-style timber structures

Abstract

Chuandou-style timber structures have been widely deployed in rural areas of Southern China; however, their seismic performance has not been fully examined. A shaking table test for a half-scale two-story Chuandou-style timber structure filled with wooden walls was performed first. The slippage of the column root, pull-out of the tenon, and extrusion deformation between the wooden wall and the timber frame were the principal damage patterns. Then, a nonlinear dynamic analysis of a finite element (FE) model of the tested structure was performed, which was established based on a reasonable structural simplification using OpenSees. Two different types of connections between the column root and cornerstone were investigated in detail: hinged connection and rigid connection. The results indicate that the relative errors between the FE modeling and experiments in terms of the first structural natural frequency were 6.5% and 11.3% in the x and y directions, respectively. The rigid connection of the column root negatively affected the dynamic response of the Chuandou-style timber structure compared to the hinged connection. The acceleration amplification factors of each structural layer were greater than 1.0 when the column root was rigidly connected, and the inherent advantages of timber structures in terms of the energy dissipation capacity were seriously diminished. Therefore, the complete rigid fixation method is not recommended for the column root in Chuandou-style timber structures in engineering practice.