On the Role of Seismic Damage Tolerance on Costs and Life Cycle of CLT Buildings

Abstract

This paper presents a contribution to reviewing the most common seismic design procedures of CLT buildings and their implications on structural features and technological solutions. Attention is particularly focused on the overall seismic performance, damage tolerance, construction costs and environmental impact. It is intended as a baseline for a more comprehensive study, thus the assessment is made with reference to a real building, representative of a class of common buildings recently designed and erected in many Italian regions exposed to low and moderate seismic hazards. As usual, the analysis was carried out according to a two-dimensional model of the panels, assumed to be elastic, varying the type of connections at the base, the presence of pre-stressing steel bars for rocking control and dissipative devices. The main outcomes of the study can be summarized as follows: (i) the structural seismic behavior of CLT buildings is significantly influenced by the structural schemes adopted for walls and connections; (ii) construction costs and environmental impact decrease whenever damage tolerance is accounted for in design procedures.

Keywords

• CLT buildings
• damage tolerance
• structural timber
• connections
• construction costs
• life cycle assessment