Project Overview
With global urbanization trends, the demands for tall residential and mixed-use buildings in the range of 8~20 stories are increasing. One new structural system in this height range are tall mass timber buildings. The Vision of this project is to develop and validate a seismic design methodology for tall wood buildings that can quantitatively account for building resilience. This design methodology will be validated through a series of full-scale shaking table tests of a 10-story CLT building specimen at the world's largest outdoor shake table at NHERI@UCSD.
This project builds on existing research and engineering knowledge on mass-timber construction and performance-based design. The scope of this project is summarized in the following figure:
Research in Progress
This research project includes nine (9) major Tasks illustrated below. The progress on these tasks will be updated on this site as the project progresses:
Task 1: Tall Wood Archetypes
Task 2: Structural Response Modeling
Task 3: Non-structural Performance Modeling
Task 4a: Sub-Assembly Testing at NHERI@Lehigh
Task 4b: Full-scale Two-story Shake Table Testing at NHERI@UCSD
Task 5: Holistic Building Modeling
Task 6: Resilience Based Seismic Design
Task 7: Ten-Story Test Specimen Design
Task 8: Full-Scale Shake Table Testing
Task 9: Dissemination
Presentations and Publications
Selected presentations for dissemination of the research project information:
- Mass Timber Movement: Mass Timber Intro (old)
- Project update 2019: Tallwood project update for SEAOC
- Project update 2020: Tallwood project update on March 11 2020
Research publications from the project:
| 1 | Cross-Laminated Timber for Seismic Regions: Progress and Challenges for Research and Implementation | Journal of Structural Engineering | Link |
| 2 | Analytical and Experimental Lateral-Load Response of Self-Centering Posttensioned CLT Walls | Journal of Structural Engineering | Link |
| 3 | Experimental Investigation of Self-Centering Cross-Laminated Timber Walls | Journal of Structural Engineering | Link |
| 4 | Experimental seismic behavior of a two-story CLT platform building | Engineering Structures | Link |
| 5 | Direct displacement design of tall cross laminated timber platform buildings with inter-story isolation | Engineering Structures | Link |
| 6 | Experimental Seismic Response of a Resilient 2-Story Mass-Timber Building with Post-Tensioned Rocking Walls | Journal of Structural Engineering | Link |
| 7 | Full-Scale Shake Table Testing of Cross-Laminated Timber Rocking Shear Walls with Replaceable Components | Journal of Structural Engineering | Link |
Useful wood system analysis tools:
SAPWood: Download
The NHERI TallWood project is supported by the National Science Foundation through a number of collaborative awards including: CMMI 1636164, CMMI 1634204, CMMI 1635363, CMMI 1635227, CMMI 1635156, CMMI 1634628. The use of NHERI experimental facility is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Program.
