New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering Conference
Research Status
Complete
Notes
April 27-29, 2017, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
Pres-Lam is a post-tensioned rocking timber technology that has been developed over the last decade at the University of Canterbury. Pres-Lam overcomes a major challenge in timber construction, the development of a high strength moment connection, by tying mass timber elements together with high-strength steel post-tensioned tendons. In seismic areas, additional reinforcing can be added to the system increasing capacity as well as providing hysteretic damping. In 2010 Pres-Lam moved from laboratory testing to onsite implementation and has now been used in the construction of numerous building in New Zealand and around the world. This paper will present the lateral load design of the first Pres-Lam structure to be built in the United States: the Peavy Building at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. Peavy is a three-storey mass timber building within the College of Forestry. A glulam and CLT gravity structure support the timber-concrete-composite floor, which is made up of CLT panels spanning between glulam beams. The lateral load carrying capacity is provided in the two orthogonal directions by Pres-Lam walls fabricated from Cross Laminated Timber (CLT). The paper will present an overview of the design philosophy and the main motivations for the use of the Pres-Lam system, discuss the requirements for U.S. code compliance, and review the nonlinear time-history analysis of the Pres-Lam structure.