Shake Table Test of the NHERI TallWood 10-story Mass Timber Building with Post-tensioned Rocking Walls and Supplemental Uplift Friction Dampers

In this experimental study, the dynamic response of a recently introduced low-damage Uplift Friction Damper (UFD) for post-tensioned rocking mass timber walls (PT-RMTWs) was investigated. The objective of these tests was to validate the performance of the proposed UFDs subjected to simulated dynamic earthquake loads installed on rocking walls with realistic boundary conditions. For this purpose, tests were conducted as a separate payload project using the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) TallWood large-scale 10-story mass timber building shake table test specimen. These additional tests were conducted after the completion of the test program by the NHERI TallWood project team. Tests were conducted at the NHERI Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table at the University of California, San Diego.

The mass timber 10-story test building designed by the TallWood project team incorporated a variety of combinations of different mass timber products. The gravity frame system consisted of a beam-column grid with veneer laminated timber beams and columns. The floor/roof panels utilized various panel types along the height of the building consisting of cross-laminated timber (CLT), Glue Laminated Timber, nail/dowel laminated timber, and veneer laminated timber (VLT) panels. The lateral system consisted of a pair of exterior post-tensioned rocking walls with VLT bounding columns in each orthogonal building direction. The rocking walls in the North-South direction and East-West direction comprised of mass plywood panel (MPP) and CLT panels, respectively. The UFD dampers were installed only at the base of the MPP rocking walls. A total of 10 earthquake shaking tests were conducted. Additionally, white noise tests were conducted to quantify the building’s natural periods. The data provided in this project provides an additional dataset to the NHERI TallWood 10-story mass timber building shake table test program that can be used by the engineering community to calibrate numerical models of PT-RMTWs with the inclusion of added supplemental energy dissipation devices.