Seismic Performance Of Wood Shear Walls Constructed With Small-diameter Round Timber

Wood structure has good seismic performance. Light wood frame constructionis light, material-saving, superior in anti-seismic capability and energy-saving andenvironmental-protecting. This kind of structures is popular in North America,Japan and Europe, especially in houses, offices and schools and other publicbuildings.In the northeast of China, it produces lots of small-diameter round timber as aresult of artificial forest every year. Rational utilization of these small-diameterround timber is of great significance to energy conservation and emission reductionand environmental protection. Shear walls are the main component to resist lateralforce for light wood frame construction, so, the main work of this paper is to studyhow to structure shear walls using small-diameter round timber, and then to analyzetheir seismic performance by the mean of experiment and simulation.In this paper, clear material test and full-scale material test are done; theirresults can be used to the computational analysis and finite element simulation.Five groups of experiment are done through the method of cyclic loading,taking the difference of the spacing of built-up studs, types of facing materials andend studs into consideration. The first two groups include1piece of shear wallsrespectively, and the after three groups both include3pieces of walls. Hystereticcurves are obtained by the experiment, and by which this paper analyzesenergy-dissipation capacity, initial stiffness, shear strength, resistance degradation,stiffness degradation, and ductility properties of the shear walls, and comes to aconclusion that the seismic performance of the shear walls meet the engineeringrequirements, compared with the ordinary shear walls of light wood frame houses.Experiments also indicate that gypsum board has an important contribution tocapacity and ductility of shear walls. Type of end studs has no effect on themechanical properties of shear wall. The spacing of built-up studs is influential tothe bearing capacity and energy-dissipation capacity of walls, but limited.By ABAQUS finite element software, mechanical characteristics of the shearwalls under cyclic lateral load are simulated, which coincides with experimental results. The more sizes of walls are analyzed giving consideration to the convenientfor engineering use.Based on Clough degradation bilinear hysteretic model, the parameters arefitted, according to the hysteresis curves obtained by experiment and simulation.The restoring force models of each wall are obtained, facilitating for the analysis orsimulation for the whole building in the future, as well as providing the reference formore engineers and technicians who intend to utilize small-diameter round timber.