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Virginia Tech

Seismic Performance Assessment of Wood-Frame Shear Wall Structures

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Wood-frame shear wall structures are widely used for residential and commercial buildings. These buildings are lightweight, have very ductile connections and includes multiple load paths. The main objective of this dissertation is to evaluate the seismic performance of a wide range of wood-frame shear wall building designs under the influence of modeling and analysis parameter variations. The first step towards the broad objective of seismic performance evaluation is to identify the different modeling and analysis parameters that can have a potential influence in the seismic response variations. The major variations considered in this study include level of critical damping, analytical modeling of damping, hysteresis model shape variations, ground motion characteristics, level of gravity loads, and floor acceleration variations. A subset of building model designs that were originally designed for the development of FEMA P-695 methodology is adapted for the numerical evaluations and a baseline for the variations is established. To study the sensitivity of inherent damping in wood-frame shear wall structures, an extensive literature survey is completed to find the experimentally observed damping levels in these buildings. Later, nonlinear dynamic analysis is performed for the range of damping levels using different Rayleigh damping models. Ground motion scaling methods, source-to-site distance, and peak intensity levels are the selected variations in ground characteristic group. To assist with the ground motion scaling procedures, a computational toolkit is created to produce amplitude and spectrum matched ground motions for response history analysis. The particular hysteresis model CASHEW that is used for the wood-frame shear wall system has a specific load-displacement shape which is a function of the shear wall design. Three key parameters of this model are varied in a range of values that were observed during experimental tests and seismic performance responses are computed for this variations. From the performance evaluations it is observed that the seismic response is quite sensitive to several of the modeling parameter variations and analysis variations mentioned above and has a unique response based on the design of the building. The range of performance variations for the different models are outlined in the chapters included in this dissertation.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph. D.
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Civil Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Jayamon, Jeena Rachel
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Charney, Finley A.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Line, Philip
  • Eatherton, Matthew R.
  • Koutromanos, Ioannis
  • Hindman, Daniel P.

Subjects

dc:subject × 5

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:9803
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/84902

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Jayamon, Jeena Rachel. Seismic Performance Assessment of Wood-Frame Shear Wall Structures. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/84902