Seismic analysis of wood building structures

The objective of this work is to develop a new model for nonlinear seismic analysis of wood building structures. The proposed inelastic material constitutive laws used in the model incorporate different types of degradation, not available in previous work. This degrading behavior has been observed during experimental testing of these types of structure under severe loading conditions. The material parameters of the new degrading model are based on physical reasoning, and are calibrated from currently available experimental data. The proposed model could be easily added to existing commercial finite element libraries, which can provide the user with a large variety of modeling capabilities. The study concludes with a correlation with experimentally tested specimens. Good agreement between analysis and tests was observed. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.