An Assessment of Seismic Floor Accelerations in Wood Shear Wall Buildings

This paper is focused on assessing the earthquake induced horizontal floor accelerations in wood shear wall buildings. While building design codes have provisions for estimating horizontal seismic design force that might occur at different story levels in a building, these procedures are empirical and do not differentiate between various types of structural systems. The research discussed in this paper evaluates the floor acceleration demands in a variety of FEMA P-695 wood-frame shear wall index models, with different damping levels and earthquake ground motion characteristics. These computed floor acceleration demands are compared against the different design demands for rigid and flexible non-structural components as recommended in the seismic design provisions of ASCE 7. The results from this study show that for the wood-frame index models studied, maximum floor accelerations frequently occurred at first floor level, which is different than the height-wise distribution of acceleration demands computed using ASCE 7 design provisions.