Performance-based seismic design of wood framed buildings

An important advancement in structural engineering in recent years has been the development of performance-based seismic design. However, its application to engineered wood framed buildings remains largely unexplored. This paper discusses the application of performance-based seismic design to wood framed buildings through a direct-displacement methodology. In the first part of the paper, limitations of the current force-based seismic design procedure for wood framed buildings are outlined. Thereafter, the fundamentals of displacement-based seismic design are presented along with a description of the system parameters required for its application. For the purpose of evaluating these parameters for wood framed buildings, a simple numerical model capable of predicting the cyclic response and energy dissipation characteristics of wood shear walls under general quasi-static cyclic loading is presented. The generalization of this model to three-dimensional wood framed structures is also discussed. As an application example, the displacement-based seismic design of a simple one-story shear wall building is presented. In turn, this design approach is validated by nonlinear dynamic time-history analyses using earthquake records representative of the hazard levels that were associated with the design performance levels.