Simplified Direct Displacement Design of Six-Story Woodframe Building and Pretest Seismic Performance Assessment

Abstract

This paper presents a simplified direct displacement design (DDD) procedure which was used to design the shear walls for a six-story woodframe structure. The building was tested in the final phase of a Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project. Specifically, NEESWood Capstone Building was designed to meet four performance expectations: damage limitation, life safety, far-field collapse prevention (CP), and near-fault CP. The performance expectations are defined in terms of combinations of interstory drift limits and prescribed seismic hazard levels associated with predefined nonexceedance probabilities. To verify that design requirements were met, a series of nonlinear time-history analyses (NLTHAs) was performed using suits of both far-field and near-fault ground motion records. The distributions of interstory drifts obtained from the NLTHA confirm that the Capstone Building designed using DDD meets all four target performance expectations, thereby validating the DDD procedure. Additionally, collapse analysis in accordance with the recently proposed Applied Technology Council project 63 (ATC-63) methodology was performed. The results of incremental dynamic analyses confirmed that the Capstone Building designed using the DDD procedure has adequate capacity margin against collapse, as dictated by the ATC-63 methodology.