Performance-Based Seismic Design of Wood Frame Buildings Using a Probabilistic System Identification Concept

Performance-based seismic design (PBSD) of wood frame structures has been only preliminarily investigated by a handful of researchers around the world and is currently under development in the United States as well as other countries worldwide. This paper presents the basic concept of applying system identification logic as one alternative for PBSD of wood frame structures. In PBSD of wood frame structures, one prescribes combinations of hazard level and corresponding performance, and “designs” the system such that these performance metrics are met. For wood frame buildings this procedure fits the definition of a system identification problem, i.e., the input and output are known and the nonlinear system between them is sought. In most cases the shearwall locations, i.e., geometry, are known, and only the wall design is sought. In this paper, the concept is presented and a procedure to apply it within a PBSD framework is proposed. The validity of the procedure is confirmed through two illustrative examples, namely the design for a two-story wood shearwall and a two-story wood frame building. An existing ten-parameter hysteresis model commonly used for seismic analysis of wood frame structures was used in both examples to represent the nonlinear system to be identified. The “design” is then checked by applying a suite of ordinary ground motion records and comparing the multirecord incremental dynamic analysis of the peak deformation response to the target (performance) curve. The approach was found to work well for the example structures and shows promise for extension to more complicated structures and performance measures.