Seismic performance of a proposed wood-concrete hybrid system for high-rise buildings

Abstract A novel wood-concrete system that can be used for high-rise construction in seismically active regions is presented and analysed. The hybrid system is achieved by substituting two out of every three concrete floors and walls in a conventional coupled core wall concrete building with prefabricated light-frame wood modules. To demonstrate the system’s feasibility, a 30-story concrete building and a 30-story hybrid building are designed for the seismicity of Vancouver, Canada, according to the 2015 National Building Code of Canada. Both buildings are evaluated with nonlinear time history analyses. To accurately consider the seismic hazard contribution from the Cascadia subduction zone, a multiple event-based conditional mean spectrum record selection method is adopted to construct target spectra for each hazard source (crustal, subcrustal and subduction). The results show that the seismic mass of the proposed hybrid system is reduced when compared to the concrete building, resulting in a shorter fundamental period but also a lower seismic load demand. The nonlinear time history analyses demonstrated that the hybrid system meets the current seismic code requirements and has lower seismic demands in terms of floor displacement, inter-story drift ratio and story shear forces in both coupling and cantilever directions, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed system for high-rise construction.