The increased demand for building materials that are friendly to the environment, along with the latest advances in wood science and technology, which exploit the fiber orientation of wood, resulted in composite wood materials known as mass-timber products. To understand the effects the wood fiber orientation has on the dynamic behavior of buildings and on vibration comfort, we examine twenty four high-rise building frames made from four different structural materials: conventional wood (Douglas-Fir), glued laminated timber (GluLam), cross laminated timber (CLT), steel and concrete. Utilizing the well-established Finite Elements Analysis (FEA), we study the building frames using a modal, a modal dynamics, an impulse response and an earthquake response analyses. These experiments revealed information about the frames such as natural frequencies (modes), resonance displacement, damping ratio, load propagation and dynamic response due to earthquake excitation. The results show that mass timber products, GluLam and CLT, when combined together demonstrate exceptional dynamic behavior, resulting in higher damping coefficients and reduced floor displacements compared to the other materials. However, they exhibited vibrations at a high frequency range, a behavior that needs further investigation in order to evaluate how it affects the integrity and longevity of the building frames.
