Wood-stud shear walls are commonly used to provide lateral stability against horizontal forces in wood houses. Therefore, accurate predictions of the deformation properties of shear walls are necessary in order to improve the design of wood frame houses against earthquake loading.
The aim of this study is to increase damping capacity of wood-stud shear walls and hence improve wood frame houses resistance against earthquake.
The starting point has been the laboratory experiments of nail joint’s deformation properties. Purpose of the experiments was to determine material properties of a nail joint. The material properties have later been used as material input data in the finite element (FE) model of wood-stud shear wall elements under alternating lateral loading.
FE results have shown that wood-stud shear wall element’s damping capacity is mainly dependent on nail joints properties, number of nail joints, wall dimension and the use of middle studs.
Background:
Wood is considered as one of the most important and reliable construction materials, since it is a renewable and has high resistance to earthquakes due to its properties. It has been used as a building material for thousands of years ago and still in the stage of research and development. One of the important research areas is enhancing earthquake resistance of the wood enframe house in the earthquakes prone regions
Source: Linnaeus University
Author: Salman, Firas | Hussain, Mouhammed