AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON FULL SCALE WOODEN FRAME RETROFITTED BY GLUED ADDITIONAL BRACES

Abstract

In Japan, there are many old and historically valuable buildings. They should be preserved as cultural properties. Most of them, however, do not have enough seismic capacity according to the current building code. They need to be retrofitted but with minimum change to the original building, since they are cultural properties. A wooden building located in Zentsuji city, Kagawa, is nominated to be one of the national important cultural properties, but is evaluated that it does not have enough seismic capacity. In order to strengthen the building, a new retrofitting technique to glue new triangle frames into existing frames is proposed, and loading tests on full scale wooden frames are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique. The test results shows that the proposed technique can increase effectively the strength and energy dissipation capability.