Reliability and fragility assessment of mid- and high-rise wood buildings subjected to seismic excitation

Abstract

The cross-laminated timber and glulam structural members could be used as structural members for mid- and high-rise buildings. Reliability of wood buildings designed following Canadian practice and constructed using such construction material that is important for design code making, is not known. In this study, the probability of incipient yield and probability of incipient collapse of three wood buildings subjected to seismic load are presented. For the analysis, an equivalent nonlinear inelastic single-degree-of-freedom system is used to approximate the building performance under seismic excitation. Reliability and fragility analyses are carried out by considering seismic hazard, and effect of record-to-record variability. Results indicate that the reliability level of such buildings is comparable to those of steel frame structures subjected to seismic excitation.

Keywords:

• Bouc-Wen hysteretic model
• designed wood buildings
• earthquake load
• normalised yield strength
• reliability assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support received from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (grant number RGPIN-2016-04814 for HPH) and the University of Western Ontario is gratefully acknowledged. S. C. Yang gratefully acknowledges the support of the China Scholarship Council (No. 201307980002).