Seismic Design and Evaluation of High-Performance Modular Tall Timber Building

The existing challenge in the built environment is to find out construction solution that reduces greenhouse gas emission and increase the community’s resilience to disasters such as an earthquake. This paper proposes a novel high-performance modular mass timber building with self-centring coupled rocking CLT shear walls. The self-centring coupled rocking CLT shear wall of a 12-story prototype building is designed using equivalent energy design procedure (EEDP) and it is seismic performance has been evaluated by employing the performance-based evaluation procedure outlined in the technical guideline published by the Canadian Construction Materials Center (CCMC)/National Research Council Canada (NRC). A robust finite element model of the self-centring coupled rocking CLT shear walls has been developed in OpenSees. The nonlinear behavior of the displacement-controlled components was calibrated using available experimental data. A suite of ground motions suitable for the site located in Vancouver has been selected, scaled, and subjected to nonlinear time history analyses at 100% and 200% uniform hazard spectrum (UHS) intensity levels according to CCMS/NRC procedure. The results show that the prototype building designed using the EEDP satisfies the acceptable limits recommended by CCMC/NRC.