Shake table testing of a full-scale seven-story steel–wood apartment building: Fid-Bau Portal

Shake table testing of a full-scale seven-story steel–wood apartment building

van de Lindt, John W. / Pryor, Steven E. / Pei, Shiling

Abstract In July 2009, a full-scale mid-rise light-frame wood apartment building was subjected to a series of earthquakes at the world’s largest shake table in Miki, Japan. The test program consisted of two major phases: the building tested in the first phase consisted of a single-story steel special moment frame (SMF) with six stories of wood on top, and the second phase consisted of locking down the steel story and testing the six-story light-frame wood building by itself. This paper focuses on the test results for the seven-story steel–wood building tested to earthquakes having return periods of 72 and 665 years. The objective of this phase of the test program was to investigate the performance of a mid-rise light-frame wood building with a first-story moment frame when subjected to a major earthquake, essentially providing a landmark data set to the seismic engineering research community. The building consisted of 225 square meters for retail space at the first story and 1350 square meters of multi-family residential living space with 23 apartment units above. The building was instrumented with just over 300 sensors and 50 LED optical tracking points to measure the component and global responses, respectively. In this paper the seven-story test specimen is described and the resulting seismic response and behavior is summarized. Detailed damage inspection was performed following each of these tests, and representative images are presented and discussed. The building was found to perform excellently, with very little damage following an event that was slightly larger (×1.16) than the design-level event for the city of Los Angeles, California. The peak global drift at roof level was 166 mm, and the peak inter-story drifts were approximately 1.3%.