NEES Research to Practice eBrownbag Webinar EERI

The NEESWood Project: Performance Based Seismic Design for Mid-Rise Woodframe Construction

John W. van de Lindt, PhD and Kelly Cobeen, SE

The NEESWood Project "Development of a Performance-Based Design Philosophy for Mid-Rise Woodframe Construction" is an NSF-funded research effort to enable the economical design and construction of mid-rise (six or more stories) woodframe buildings in seismic regions of the US and around the world. To do this, the NEESWood project team is performing a four-year, five-university project beginning with testing at the University at Buffalo's NEES twin earthquake shake tables and ending with the testing of a full-scale six-story woodframe building on the world's largest shake table near Kobe, Japan in 2009.

Five researchers from universities around the US (van de Lindt, Colorado State; Filiatrault, Buffalo; Rosowsky, Texas A&M; Symans, RPI; and Davidson, Cornell) are working on developing new software and design approaches based on specific performance expectations of woodframe structures during earthquakes. The project includes a Practitioner Advisory Committee (PAC) made up of wood industry and design experts including Kelly Cobeen, SE of Cobeen & Associates in San Francisco.

This webinar will focus on four topics:
  • Two-story townhouse building tests recently completed in Buffalo
  • New earthquake engineering analysis software being developed within NEESWood
  • Performance-based seismic design of woodframe buildings
  • NEESWood six-story building shake table tests to be conducted in Japan in 2009
Each topic will be presented from the research angle by van de Lindt, and then Cobeen will address how each topic and the project as a whole may influence earthquake engineering practice.