LOAD-BEARING TIMBER DSF ELEMENTS INFLUENCE ON RACKING STABILITY OF MULTI-STOREY PREFABRICATED TIMBER BUILDINGS

Abstract

Application of double-skin façade (DSF) elements is an important approach in a designing process of contemporary multi-storey timber buildings. A double-skin facade is an envelope wall element that consists of two glass components separated by a cavity and can essentially improve building-physics properties of building envelope. In a sense to reduce global warming potential (GWP) an ecological solution with a timber frame is presented in this paper. Recently, many studies have analyzed thermal and acoustic performance of DSF elements, but practically none in a sense of structural behavior, especially in determination of racking resistance of such wall elements. Because costs of experiments performed on such full-scale DSF elements are very high and such experiments are also very time-consuming, a special mathematical model using a Finite Element Method (FEM) for analyzing the racking resistance and stiffness was further developed. Finally, a specially selected four-storey timber-framed building is subjected to a seismic analysis comparing the influence of the developed timber DSF elements on the overall racking behavior of that structure with non-resisting DSF function. It is demonstrated in the presented study on the selected case that the racking resistance (R) and a consequent seismic resistance of a whole building can be essentially improved if DSF elements are considered as lateral load-bearing wall elements. Consequently, such an approach by using DSF elements as additional bracing wall elements can essentially further increase a potential of designing also high-rise timber buildings with asymmetric position of transparent areas.