Eccentric arrangement of shear walls leads to torsional vibration, which is one of the reasons for collapses or severe damages of huge number of wooden houses in the past earthquakes. Therefore eccentricity ratio
Re is defined in Japanese Building Standard Law to confirm the adequacy of shear walls' arrangement. Although
Re is calculated in each story and in each direction, it does not consider interaction between different stories. For example, even though a story does not have any eccentricity, torsional response can be excited by another story with eccentricity. Such a phenomenon is not simulated by
Re.
Most of Japanese wooden houses are two-story, and some of them have setback. In addition, the lower story typically has larger eccentricity and the upper story has less eccentricity. The torsional interaction as stated above is likely to affect the displacement mode of wooden houses.
In this paper, prediction method of displacement mode for two-story wooden structure with eccentricity is proposed, and the applicability is discussed. When a single-story structure is considered, dynamic displacement mode including torsional response is approximated by our previous method
7) instead of solving eigen value equation. Therefore displacement mode in each story without interaction is firstly evaluated, and the interaction effect is added to it. The key idea is based on "Force-Dependent Ritz Vector" which gives simple formulae of practical use.
The structure is assumed to be linearly elastic and to have uni-axial eccentricity and infinitely-rigid floor diaphragm. Uni-directional earthquake input is considered. The followings are findings of this paper.
1) Prediction method of torsional displacement mode considering interaction between upper and lower stories was proposed, and the accuracy was confirmed by comparison with numerical analyses.
2) While torsion in lower story is not so affected by upper story, the one in upper story is clearly affected by lower story.
3) A story with eccentricity apparently has less lateral story stiffness compared to the one without eccentricity, resulting in large story drift.
4) If a deference of eccentricity ratios in upper and lower stories exceeds 0.15, an interaction of torsion between upper and lower stories should be considered. If not, it is negligible.
In this research, two-story wooden house was focused on as a representative of multi-story building having different length of eccentricities in each story. However, a base isolated building whose superstructure has eccentricity has the same problem, and the proposed method can be applied to such structures.
Since this research considers linearly elastic structures with uni-axial eccentricity, issues like non-linearity and bi-axial eccentricity will be investigated in the future research.
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