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Experimental and numerical investigations

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Article in Engineering Structures November 2017

DOI: 10.1016/j.engstruct.2017.08.011

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 Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Engineering Structures
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/engstruct

Experimental and numerical investigations into seismic performance of

timber-steel hybrid structure with supplemental dampers
Zheng Li, Hanlin Dong, Xijun Wang, Minjuan He
Department of Structural Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Although building structures can be designed to meet the life safety criterion and to deform inelastically
Received 11 April 2017 without inducing collapse under major earthquakes, the structural and nonstructural damage associated
Revised 15 July 2017 with inelastic responses is normally very costly to repair. In this paper, friction dampers are utilized to
Accepted 6 August 2017
upgrade the seismic performance of timber-steel hybrid structure, which has been proposed as an alter-
native structural solution for multi-story buildings. The hybrid structural system consists of steel
moment resisting frame and infill light wood frame shear wall, both of which serve as the main lateral
Keywords:
load resisting components, and friction dampers are introduced as frame-to-wall connectors to mitigate
Timber-steel hybrid structure
Seismic performance
earthquake-induced damage. Pseudo-static loading tests were carried out on three timber-steel hybrid
Friction damper lateral load resisting subassemblies, and test results showed that the friction dampers were very effective
Cyclic loading test in dissipating earthquake input energy, and correspondingly, much less damage was observed within the
Numerical modeling main structural members. The software package OpenSees was used to simulate the hysteretic behavior
of the hybrid structure, and the developed finite element model was further validated by test results.
Moreover, an optimal damper design solution was provided for a four-story timber-steel hybrid proto-
type building according to the numerical results from massive time-history analyses. Finally, the floor
acceleration and inter-story drift responses of the prototype building with optimal damper configura-
tions were assessed. This research aims to contribute to the development of novel timber hybrid struc-
tural systems with enhanced seismic performance.
2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction effect in its hysteretic loops. The application of viscoelastic dam-

Observations from previous destructive earthquakes showed
that timber or timber based hybrid buildings performed relatively
well to protect life safety, and such performance is mainly due to
the small self-weight of timber structural components combined
with their ductile behavior under large inter-story drifts. However,
excessive deformation is normally associated with significant
structural and nonstructural damage. The seismic responses of a
building can be reduced by introducing supplemental damping
systems, which increase the energy dissipation capacity of the
building without inducing inelastic behavior in the structural com-
ponents. Based on such concept, a kind of friction-damped wood
shear wall was proposed by Filiatrault [1]. The friction dampers
consist of a slotted slip joint that dissipates energy via friction as
sliding motion is induced by shear deformation of the wall. Analyt-
ical results showed the friction dampers improved the seismic per-
formance of the shear wall by essentially eliminating the pinching
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: hemj@tongji.edu.cn (M. He).
pers to improve the seismic performance of wood shear walls
was experimentally validated by Dinehart and Shenton [2] and
Dinehart et al. [3], and results showed that the viscoelastic dam-
pers provided a stable source of energy dissipation during cyclic
motion of the wood shear wall. Higgins [4] investigated the effec-
tiveness of using hysteretic dampers on upgrading the perfor-
mance of wood shear walls. The proposed hysteretic damper
consists of a diagonal brace with one end fixed at the top corner
of the wall and the other end connected to the opposite corner of
the wall through a sliding anchorage. Test results showed that
the hysteretic damper was able to reduce the stiffness and strength
degradation of the wood shear wall under large drifts. More
recently, Loo et al. [5] developed a novel friction connector as
replacement for conventional hold-down device for Laminated
Veneer Lumber (LVL) shear walls. Experimental results revealed
that significantly improved performance was obtained for the
LVL walls with the friction connectors compared to conventional
walls especially in terms of residual deformation responses [6].
Furthermore, the slip friction connectors were used in self-
centering steel-timber rocking core walls as energy dissipation

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2017.08.011
0141-0296/ 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
34 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343
devices [7]. Kim et al. [8] studied a hybrid energy dissipation
device with friction pads and steel slit plate. The seismic perfor-
mance was validated by cyclic loading tests, and the effectiveness
was investigated by life-cycle analysis. From the aspect of struc-
tural design, Pu et al. [9] proposed a displacement-based design
methodology for timber structures with hysteretic dampers.
Pohsi et al. [10] compared the effectiveness of several feasible
tuned mass damper (TMD) design solutions for a seven-story cross
laminated timber (CLT) building, and analytical results indicated
optimized TMD configurations could bring about 40% reduction
in floor accelerations.
A kind of timber-steel hybrid structure has been proposed by
the authors [11,12] to serve as a structural solution for multi-
story buildings in seismic prone regions. Previous experiments
showed that although with a preferred ability to avoid collapse,
the structure suffered substantial damage under large inter-story
drifts. The inelastic behavior of the structure is capable of provid-
ing sufficient energy dissipation. However, such energy dissipating
mechanism results in a significantly increased repair effort/cost,
and in some cases may lead to the situation that it is even more
economical to rebuild the building instead of conduct repair work
on it. This study presents a series of experimental and numerical
studies on quantifying the effectiveness of using friction dampers
to upgrade the seismic performance of timber-steel hybrid
structures.
2. Damper configurations
The proposed hybrid structure consists of steel moment resist-
ing frame and infill light wood frame shear walls, which are con-
sidered as two lateral load-resisting subsystems. It should be
noted that the infill wood shear walls provide a considerable con-
tribution to the lateral resistance of the structure, thus the func-
tionality of the wood shear walls in the hybrid structure is quite
different from that of conventional non-structural infill walls
[11]. Friction dampers are incorporated into the frame-to-wall con-
nections as illustrated in Fig. 1(a). The damper consists of contact-
ing friction interface that is clamped by pretension high strength
bolts, and energy is dissipated through the sliding of the friction
interface. The inner steel plate is realized with a slotted hole, which
is machined in the center of the plate to allow bolt slippage. How-
ever, both outer steel plates are realized with bolt holes of regular
size. The outer steel plates are bolted to the bottom flange of the
steel beam, and the inner steel plate is fixed to the top of wood
shear wall through a steel connector with screws. Based on previ-
ous investigations into friction damping devices, the NAO780
material produced by Motion Control Industries was selected as
frictional pad for the dampers in this study. The NAO pad is non-
asbestos organic material and is multi-component composite that
Fig. 1. Friction damper between steel frame and infill wood shear wall.
is composed of a resin system, fiber-reinforcement, metallic fric-
tion modifiers, abrasive, and inorganic filler. Detailed information
about the NAO780-steel interface can be found in [13]. The dura-
bility of this friction material has been proved in [13]. As shown
in Fig. 1(b), recesses have been introduced on the outer plates to
accommodate the frictional pads. The recesses were machined on
both outer plates and the thickness of the recesses was set as
1.7 mm (the thickness of frictional pad was 5 mm in this study).
As shown in Fig. 1(c), only a small amount of epoxy is needed to
fasten the frictional pad to the steel plate due to the existence of
the recesses. The frictional sliding force of the clamped interface,
which is also considered as the activation force of the damper,
can be controlled by the magnitude of tightening torque applied
on the high-strength bolts. The photos of the damper with two
types of connections to the wood wall are shown in Fig. 1(d) and
(e), and the configuration of the connections will be described in
the following section.
Fig. 2 illustrates the lateral load resisting behavior of the struc-
ture with friction dampers. At low lateral load levels as shown in
Fig. 2(a), the friction dampers will not activate but act as stiff
frame-to-wall shear connectors to produce a large initial lateral
stiffness. With increased lateral loads, the dampers will activate
as long as the static friction force on the interfaces is overcome.
As shown in Fig. 2(b), at this stage, the lateral load carried by the
infill wall is equal to the constant sliding shear force in the dam-
pers, which means the lateral load carried by the wall ceases to
increase and both the plastic deformation and damage in the wall
can be significantly reduced. Energy is dissipated through the slid-
ing of the friction interfaces within the dampers, and such mecha-
nism can be utilized in moderate and/or major earthquakes to
control damage in main structural components. Under extreme
large lateral loads, the dampers are deigned to lock when the bolts
slide to the end of pre-defined slot on the inner steel plate. If this
happens, the infill walls start to deform laterally and resist lateral
loads as shown in Fig. 2(c), which increases the robustness of the
structure and further protect it from collapse.
3. Cyclic loading tests
3.1. Specimens
The hysteretic performance of the damped timber-steel hybrid
lateral load resisting system (LLRS) was evaluated through
pseudo-static tests. Three single-story timber-steel hybrid lateral
load-resisting subassemblies (i.e. S1, S2, and S3) were designed
as test specimens. The specimens were half-scaled in dimension
from a prototype structure designed as a common office building.
The lateral stiffness was also half-scaled by modifying the size of
the steel members and the nailing space of wood sheathing. The
 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343 35

Fig. 2. Damped timber-steel hybrid structure under lateral loads.

three specimens have identical geometric dimensions with a width
of 2.4 m and a height of 1.65 m as shown in Fig. 3. The steel frame
was fabricated with H-section members that are made of Q235B
mild carbon structural steel, which has a yield strength of
235 MPa and a modulus of elasticity of 206 GPa according to Chi-
nese Standard GB 50017 [14]. For each specimen, one
H100
100
6
8 was used as the beam member, and two
H125
125
6.5
9 s were used as the column members. 8.8 s
high-strength bolts that are equivalent to ASTM A325 bolts [15]
were used as fasteners for the steel frame. For specimens S1 and
S2, the steel beam-to-column connection was designed as reduced
beam section (RBS) connection according to the provisions in AISC
358-10 [16], thus yielding zone is expected to occur mainly within
the RBS of the beam. For fabrication, a section of steel beam with
RBS was firstly welded to each steel column in factory, and
beam-to-beam splice connection was designed to connect the rest
of the beam section to the steel column in the laboratory. However,
for specimen S3, regular beam section without RBS was adopted
for comparison purpose.
Kiln dried No. 3 grade (according to NLGA 2014 [17]) Spruce-
Pine-Fir (SPF) 38
89 mm dimension lumber with average mois-
ture content of 14% was used as studs for the wooden frame, and
the spacing of the studs was set as 400 mm. Both the bottom plate
and end stud of the wooden frame had double dimension lumber
members, while the interior stud of the wooden frame had single
dimension lumber members. Oriented strand board (OSB) panels
with a thickness of 9.5 mm were used as double sheathings for
each wood shear wall, and pneumatic nails with 82.5 mm in length
and 3.3 mm in diameter were used as sheathing-to-framing fasten-
ers. The spacing of adjacent nailed sheathing-to-framing connec-
tions was set as 150 mm along the sheathing edge and as
300 mm along the intermediate supports of the sheathings. The
nail spacing is shown schematically in Fig. 3(a).
As shown in Fig. 3, two friction dampers are installed with a
spacing of 1350 mm for each specimen. The outer plates of the
dampers are bolted to the bottom flange of the steel beam, while
two different configurations are considered for the damper-to-
wall connections. For specimen S1, the inner plates of the dampers

Fig. 3. Layouts of the specimens (all dimensions are in mm): (a) Overview; (b) Beam-to-beam splice connection; (c) RBS; (d) Damper to wall connection for specimen S1; and
(e) Damper to wall connection for specimens S2 and S3.
36 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343
were directly screwed to the top of the wood shear wall. For spec-
imens S2 and S3, the inner plates of the dampers were welded to
U-shape steel connectors which were further connected to the
wood shear wall by screws. This kind of connection is much easier
to assemble compared to the former one, though the stiffness may
be a little bit smaller because of the nails have to pass through the
OSB panel that is quite weak under shear. The bottom of the infill
wall was anchored to the foundation beam; however, no connec-
tions were set between wood wall and the steel column in order
to allow relative lateral movements between the two. It should
be noted that the summation of shear force in the dampers equals
to the shear force in the wood wall. The load resisting behavior of
the damped timber-steel hybrid structure is closely related to the
damper activation force. If a small damper activation force is
selected, the dampers start to slide and dissipate energy under a
relative low level of seismic excitation. Correspondingly, only a
small fraction of the applied lateral loads can be resisted by the
wall, which decreases the load resisting capacity of the structure.
Conversely, if a large damper activation force is selected, the infill
wall is able to resist more lateral loads but may suffer excessive
damage at the same time. Specimen S1 and specimen S2 were
designed with the same damper activation force of 30 kN, while
the damper activation force for specimen S3 was set as a slightly
lower value of 23 kN. The ultimate load resisting capacity of the
infill wood shear wall is 60 kN. As such, damper activation is
expected to occur prior to the state that the shear force in the infill
wall reaches half of its ultimate loading resisting capacity. The
length of slotted hole on the inner steel plate of the damper con-
trols the maximum sliding distance of the friction interface. In
order to investigate damper locking behavior under various
inter-story drifts, the length of the slotted holes was set as
57.5 mm (3.5% drift ratio), 31 mm (1.8% drift ratio), and
23 mm (1.4% drift ratio) for specimens S1, S2, and S3, respectively.
3.2. Test arrangement
As shown in Fig. 4, the lateral force was applied by an actuator
that has a maximum loading capacity of 300 kN. Fig. 5(a) shows the
arrangements of LVDTs (linear voltage displacement transducers)
and strain gages. LVDT1 and LVDT2 are used to measure the lateral
deformation of the specimen. LVDT3 and LVDT4 are used to mea-
sure the uplift of the specimen. LVDT5 and LVDT6, which are
installed diagonally, are used to measure the shear deformation
of the specimen. The load sharing behavior between the frame
and the wall has a crucial impact on the seismic behavior of the
Fig. 4. Test setup and instrumentation.
hybrid structure. For each specimen, the applied shear force was
separated into two parts: the shear force carried by the frame
and the shear force carried by the wall. The readings from strain
gages SG1 to SG4 were used to calculate the shear force in the left
steel column (Fl), and similarly, the readings from strain gages SG5
to SG8 were used to calculate the shear force in the right steel col-
umn (Fr). SG1 and SG2 were located symmetrically at the cross sec-
tion corresponding to the top third point of the column, and SG3
and SG4 were located symmetrically at the cross section corre-
sponding to the bottom third point of the column. The free-body
diagram of the portion of steel column between the top third point
and the bottom third point is shown in Fig. 5(b), and pre-test finite
element (FE) modeling results showed that this portion of steel col-
umn was completely in the elastic range during the entire loading
process. Since shear force equals to the rate of change of bending
moment, the shear force carried by the steel frame (Fsf) is calcu-
lated as the summation of the shear force in the left steel column
and that in the right steel column (i.e. Fl + Fr), which are obtained
using Eq. (1).
M t  M b etmax  etmin  ebmax ebmin EW
F l or F r 1
L 2L
where Mt and Mb represent the internal bending moment in the
steel column, and L is equal to one third of the length of the steel
column (i.e. 550 mm). Mt is calculated based on the readings from
the strain gages located at the cross section corresponding to the
top third point of the column (i.e. etmin and etmax), and Mb is calcu-
lated based on the readings from the strain gages located at the
cross section corresponding to the bottom third point of the column
(i.e. ebmax and ebmin). E and W represent the modulus of elasticity of
steel and bending modulus of the steel column, respectively. Both
the lateral force carried by the wall (Fw) and the total shear force
in the dampers (Fd) are equal to F  Fsf, and F represents the total
shear force carried by the hybrid structure.
ISO 16670 cyclic loading protocol was adopted for the tests as
recommended in ASTM E2126 [18]. As shown in Fig. 6, the protocol
has two displacement control patterns: the first control pattern
includes single loading cycles corresponding to 1.25%, 2.5%, 5%,
7.5%, and 10% of the control displacement D. The following control
pattern includes three loading cycles with equal amplitude corre-
sponding to 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100%, and 120% of the control dis-
placement D. In this study, D was adopted as the lateral
displacement corresponding to 3% inter-story drift, which was
equal to 48 mm.
3.3. Failure modes
It was observed that all the specimens exhibited similar failure
modes. Initially, the dampers served as stiff shear connectors and
the shear wall deformed laterally with the steel frame. Besides
minor splitting of sheathing panel and nail embedding near the
edge nailed connections as shown in Fig. 7(a), no other failure
was observed in the specimens. The dampers started to slide when
the shear force in the wood shear wall reached the pre-defined
damper activation force. During this stage, the lateral deformation
of the specimen mainly resulted from deformation of the steel
frame. Yielding of the reduced beam section was observed as
shown in Fig. 7(b), and at this stage, only minor damage was
observed in the infill wall. The damper locked upon larger lateral
deformation, and again, the wood shear wall started to participate
in resisting lateral load. When the inter-story drift of the speci-
mens reached 3%, nail pull-through with sheathing tear-out was
observed as primary failure mode as shown in Fig. 7(c), and screw
fatigue fracture, which was induced by reduplicative bending
under cyclic loads, was observed as secondary failure mode as
shown in Fig. 7(d).
 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343 37

Fig. 5. Data Acquisition (all dimensions are in mm): (a) Arrangements of LVDTs and strain gages; and (b) Method of calculating the shear force in steel column.

Fig. 6. Loading protocol.
3.4. Hysteretic performance
Fig. 8 shows the hysteretic force and lateral deformation rela-
tionships. For each specimen, the force hysteretic responses in
the subsystems (i.e. the infill wall and the steel frame) are also pre-
sented. As expected, the shear force carried by the wall ceases to
increase as long as damper activation occurs, though a slight
increase was seen at the late loading stage, which was caused by
the friction force between bolt and the top/bottom edge of the slot.
This plateau implies the reason why the observed damage in the
wood shear wall was not as severe as that observed in a conven-
tional timber-steel hybrid system as reported in [11]. It is noted
with a smaller sliding distance, the wood shear wall is able to par-
ticipate in resisting lateral load under a smaller drift. For example,
the dampers in specimen S3 locked under the inter-story drift of
1.61%, and the stiffness of the hybrid system increased at this drift
correspondingly. However, the occurrence of damper locking in
specimen S1 was at a much larger inter-story drift of 3.14%, and
the stiffness of the hybrid system almost remained as a constant
when the drift was smaller than 3.14%.
The illustration of load sharing mechanism between the infill
wall and the steel frame is an interesting aspect for further under-
standing the load resisting behavior of the hybrid structure. The
load sharing percentages between the subsystems under various
lateral displacements are illustrated in Fig. 9. Initially, the infill
walls carried most of the applied load. Under the drift ratio of
0.7%, beyond which yielding zones may occur within the steel
moment resisting frame with rigid beam-to-column connections
according to [19], the infill walls in average resisted 60.32% of
the load applied to the hybrid structure. Thus, the infill walls can
be considered as primary lateral load resisting components under

Fig. 7. Failure modes.

38 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343

(a) Specimen S1

(b) Specimen S2

(c) Specimen S3
Fig. 8. Hysteretic responses and the shear force resisted by corresponding subsystems.

small drift ratios. As test proceeded, damper activation occurred,
and the percentage of shear force carried by the infill wall started
to decrease. Such phenomenon continued until the relative frame-
to-wall displacement was large enough to lock the dampers. Since
the dampers in specimen S1 have the largest sliding distance
before locking, more applied load has to be carried by the steel
frame especially under large drifts. Analytical results showed that
the steel frame in specimen S1 resisted 45.71% and 35.49% of the
applied shear force under the drift ratio of 2% and 3%, respectively.
This may be considered as an unfavorable load-resisting pattern
since the steel frame may not have sufficient capacity and the
structure may suffer a risk of collapse under large drifts. The load

Fig. 9. Loading sharing between wood shear wall and steel frame: (a) Specimen S1; (b) Specimen S2; and (c) Specimen S3.
 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343 39

Fig. 10. Schematic of finite element model: (a) Element type; and (b) Force-slip relationship of friction damper.

resisting performance of specimen S2 is improved since the wood

shear wall resisted a majority of the shear force within 2% drift, and
almost half of the applied shear force is resisted by the wood shear
wall beyond 2% drift. For specimen S3, the wood shear wall resisted
44.80% of the applied shear force under 2% drift ratio, and this
value further increased to 62.92% under 3% drift ratio. It should
be noted that such behavior provided the structure with extra
resistance and robustness.

4. Numerical models

A FE model was developed for the specimens within the Open-

Sees framework [20] as shown in Fig. 10(a). The steel frame was
modeled by displacement-based beam-column element (i.e. dis-
pBeamColumn) with a uniaxial bilinear steel material with kine-
matic hardening property (i.e. steel01). The steel sections were
meshed into fiber sections and aggregated with shear and torsional
stiffness. Five-point Gauss-Lobatto integration was assigned with
the steel column and beam elements to increase modeling accu-
racy. The hysteretic performance of wood shear wall is featured
by pinching effect due to strength/stiffness degradation. In previ-
ous studies, the authors have developed a mechanical based hys-
teretic element for wood shear walls within the software
package ABAQUS [21], and a user-defined element was compiled
to simulate the seismic response of wood shear walls. However,
the calibration and compiling of such elements are very time-
consuming, and it is always difficult to converge when the model
has too many such user-defined elements. In this study, the hys-
teretic behavior of the wood shear wall was modeled by the
twoNodeLink element with the Pinching4 uniaxial material,
which is developed for pinched systems within the OpenSees
framework. As long as the wood shear wall is designed, the hys-
teresis curve of the wall can be either obtained by experiment, or
the numerical model with user-defined elements in ABAQUS, fol-
lowing the modeling strategy described in [21]. Thus, the calibra-
tion of the Pinching4 material parameters can be easily done
by regression algorithm based on the hysteresis curve. More
importantly, the Pinching4 model is very robust and therefore
problems in computational convergence are greatly avoided. For
the friction dampers, there are mainly four characteristics to be
simulated, i.e. initial stiffness, activation, locking of the device,
and post-locking behavior. An elastic force-displacement behavior
with high initial stiffness was used to model the performance of
the damper before activation. When damper activation occurs,
the shear force in the damper remains as a constant that is equal
to the activation load, and an elastic perfectly plastic uniaxial
material was used to model such behavior. The damper locks when
the bolt reaches the edge of the slotted hole on the inner steel
panel. Since bolt slippage no longer occurs in this stage, it is
assumed that the stiffness of the damper is identical to its initial
stiffness. Fig. 10(b) shows the force-slip relationship of the friction
damper.
Fig. 11. Model verification by test results of specimen S3.
Fig. 11 shows the model verification against test results. For
simplicity, only the modeling result for specimen S3 is presented.
The pinching4 material model used in the simulation was symmet-
ric in tension and compression. The controlling points on the
envelop curve were (0 mm, 0 kN), (3 mm, 14 kN), (13 mm,
60 kN), (80 mm, 22 kN). The three ratios representing reloading
deformation, reloading strength, and unloading strength were
0.4, 0.39 and 0.03, respectively. It is noted that the developed
model is capable of providing good predictions in terms of hys-
teretic behavior, thus it is further used to evaluate the seismic per-
formance of a prototype structure in the following section.
5. Performance evaluation of prototype structure
This section investigates the effectiveness of using the proposed
friction damper configurations on upgrading the seismic perfor-
mance of a four-story prototype timber-steel hybrid structure. An
optimization procedure was firstly carried out to obtain favorable
damper parameters, and then the seismic performance of the
damped structure was evaluated.
5.1. Structural design
The prototype structure is located in Sichuan Province, which is
one of the seismic prone zones in China. Fig. 12 shows the floor
plan of the structure, which has four stories with the same story
height of 3.3 m. 2.5 kN/m2 is taken as the floor live load for com-
mon offices, and 0.5 kN/m2 is taken as the roof live load. Q235B
structural steel with yield strength of 235 MPa and modulus of
elasticity of 206 GPa is used for the steel frame members. The steel
frame was designed according to the provisions in [14,19]. The sec-
tions of the steel members are given in Table 1. The elastic stiffness
of the infill wall at each story was designed as twice the stiffness of
steel frame according to the recommendations in [22]. As long as
40 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343

Fig. 12. Prototype structure configuration.

Table 1
Sections of steel frame members.*

Building height Story No. Column Beam (external) Beam (internal)

4-story 1 H-200
200
8
12 H-250
175
7
11 H-150
100
6
9
2, 3 H-175
175
7.5
11 H-250
175
7
11 H-150
100
6
9
4 H-150
150
7
10 H-200
150
6
9 H-150
100
6
9
*
Note: The members are all hot rolled H-section steel members. H-a
b
c
d indicates the section has a height of a and a width of b. The web thickness is c, and the
flange thickness is d (all dimensions are in mm).

the stiffness of the infill wall was determined, other configurations
of the wall (e.g. nail pattern, sheathing thickness, etc.) were
selected according to the provisions in [23]. Friction dampers were
arranged from the first story to the third story, while for the fourth
story, the infill walls were connected to the steel frame through
conventional bolted connections.
5.2. Seismic hazard
As listed in Table 2, twenty destructive historical earthquake
records, most of which are selected from the Pacific Earthquake
Engineering Research Centers Next Generation Attenuation
(NGA) database were used as seismic input both for damper opti-
mization and for performance evaluation of the structure. As in
[19], the average return periods for minor, moderate and major
earthquakes are 50, 475, and 2475 years, which are in accordance
with 50-year exceedance probabilities of 63%, 10% and 2%, respec-
tively. Numerical analytical result showed that the fundamental
period T of the prototype structure was 0.706 s. In order to capture
the structural responses over the entire range of periods, the
twenty historical earthquake excitations were scaled to match
the design spectrum with the period range from 0.2T to 1.5T. Thus,
the lower bound of the period is to capture the higher modes of the
elastic structure, and the upper bound is to capture the nonlinear
responses. The software package SeismoMatch [24] was used to con-
duct the matching process based on the wavelet algorithm proposed
by Hancock et al. [25]. Fig. 13 shows an example for the matching
results for the major earthquake level, which has a plateau spectral

Table 2
Historical earthquake records.

NO. Event Year Station name Component PGA (g) RJB (km) Magnitude Vs30 (m/s)
1 Imperial Valley-02 1940 El Centro Array #9 180 0.2808 6.09 6.95 213.44
2 Kern County 1952 Taft Lincoln School 021 0.1589 38.42 7.36 385.43
3 Gazli USSR 1976 Karakyr 090 0.8639 3.92 6.80 259.59
4 Imperial Valley-06 1979 Bonds Corner 140 0.5987 0.44 6.53 223.03
5 Imperial Valley-06 1979 EC County Center FF 092 0.2354 7.31 6.53 192.05
6 Imperial Valley-06 1979 El Centro - Meloland Geot. Array 270 0.2976 0.07 6.53 264.57
7 Imperial Valley-06 1979 El Centro Array #8 230 0.4661 3.86 6.53 206.08
8 Imperial Valley-06 1979 El Centro Differential Array 360 0.4814 5.09 6.53 202.26
9 Corinth_ Greece 1981 Corinth L 0.2368 10.27 6.60 361.40
10 Coalinga-01 1983 Parkfield - Fault Zone 14 090 0.2739 28.11 6.36 246.07
11 Coalinga-01 1983 Parkfield - Fault Zone 3 000 0.1399 36.14 6.36 211.74
12 Cape Mendocino 1992 Cape Mendocino 000 1.4936 0.00 7.01 567.78
13 Kobe Japan 1995 Nishi-Akashi 090 0.4643 7.08 6.90 609.00
14 Chi-Chi Taiwan 1999 CHY046 N 0.1901 24.10 7.62 442.15
15 Landers 1992 North Palm Springs Fire Sta #36 090 0.1389 26.95 7.28 367.84
16 Niigata Japan 2004 NIG023 EW 0.2802 25.33 6.63 654.76
17 Iwate Japan 2008 Yamauchi Tsuchibuchi Yokote EW 0.2579 25.61 6.90 561.59
18 Darfield New Zealand 2010 Christchurch Cashmere High School E 0.2291 17.64 7.00 204.00
19 Wenchuan 2008 Wolong EW 0.9767 19.00 8.00 /
20 Canterbury 2011 Christchurch Botanic Garden EW 0.5600 5.75 6.19 194.40

Note: RJB is Joyner-Boore distance to rupture plane, and Vs30 is the average shear wave velocity of the upper 30 m of the site profile.
 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343
Fig. 13. Ground motion records scaled to the design spectrum for major earthquake
level.
acceleration equal to 0.90 g. It is worth mentioning that the plateau
spectral accelerations corresponding to the minor and moderate
seismic hazard levels are 0.16 g and 0.45 g, respectively.
5.3. Optimization of damper design
The damper performance can be controlled primarily by the
magnitude of activation force and the maximum sliding distance
before locking. For the prototype structure, an optimization proce-
dure is employed to determine the damper activation force for
each story, while the maximum sliding distance is set as a constant
that equals to 1.5% inter-story drift. The four-story structure is sim-
plified into a MDOF model as illustrated in Fig. 14. M1 to M4 rep-
resent the associated mass of the structure, and Sf1 to Sf4
represent the elasto-perfectly plastic springs to model the steel
frame. Si1 to Si4 represent the Pinching4 springs to model the
wood shear walls. Sd1 to Sd3 represent the aforementioned com-
bined springs to model the dampers. Pushover analysis indicated
that the bare steel frame on the first story had a lateral stiffness
of 6.7 kN/mm. Identical lateral stiffness of 3.5 kN/mm was
obtained for the bare steel frames on the second and the third sto-
ries, while the lateral stiffness of the bare steel frame on the fourth
story was obtained as 2.1 kN/mm. According to the design of the
prototype structure, the infill walls were designed as twice stiff
as the bare steel frame. A range of damper activation force (i.e.
from 36 kN to 126 kN with an increment of 18 kN) was defined,
resulting in 63 = 216 possible damper combinations. The suite of
M4
Sf4 Si4
M3
Sf3 Si3
Sd3
M2
Sf2 Si2
Sd2
M1
Sf1 Si1
Sd1
Fig. 14. Simplified MDOF model.
41
Fig. 15. Damper selection based on nonlinear modeling results.
earthquake records corresponding to the major earthquake level
described as listed in Table 1 were used as excitations for the
MDOF system, and the average response was obtained and ana-
lyzed to find optimal damper parameters. The interested responses
are the roof displacement (D), the variation of inter-story drift
along building height (R), and the ratio of the largest shear force
carried by the wood shear wall to the damper activation force
(S). As the uniform inter-story drift is expected, the variation of
inter-story drift can be reflected as R = (d1  d3/3)2 + (d2  2d3/3)2,
where d1 to d3 refers to the average displacement of the first story
to the third story. The roof displacement is supposed to be as small
as possible, and at the same time, the response with smaller R
value is preferred since it represents a more uniform distribution
of inter-story drifts. Since the dampers are installed to control
the seismic induced damage in the wood shear walls, S is supposed
to be no less than 3.0. Fig. 15 shows a scatter plotting based on
nonlinear numerical modeling results, and each point in the figure
represents a unique damper solution. The x-axis of the figure refers
to R and the y-axis refers to S. The area of the point is proportional
to the magnitude of D. The red point on the left bottom corner (i.e.
with R = 0.913, S = 3.482, and D = 100.722) is chosen as the optimal
damper design for the prototype structure. Thus, the correspond-
ing damper activation force for the first story, the second story,
and the third story are determined as 72 kN, 126 kN and 54 kN,
respectively.
5.4. Inter-story drift response
Nonlinear dynamic time-history analyses were carried out
under minor, moderate and major seismic hazard levels to compre-
hensively assess the performance of the prototype structure with
the optimized damper configurations. For comparison, the seismic
performance of the prototype structure without dampers
(i.e. undamped structure) was also simulated and presented.
Fig. 16 shows the average structural inter-story drifts and the
corresponding standard deviations under the three hazard levels.
The deformation envelope of the damped structure under minor
earthquakes is almost identical to that of the undamped structure,
indicating the dampers act as stiff shear connectors at this stage. As
expected, the dampers activated under moderate earthquakes, and
the inter-story drift of the structure is reduced by up to 27.5 % (at
the second story) due to the dampers. Such effect is more promi-
nent when the structures were subjected to major earthquakes.
Except for the first story, the inter-story drift of the damped struc-
ture is much smaller than that of the undamped structure. The
standard deviations of the drift responses are also shown as error
42 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343

Fig. 16. Average deformation envelope under: (a) Minor earthquake; (b) Moderate earthquake; and (c) Major earthquake.

Fig. 17. Peak inter-story drift distributions under: (a) Minor earthquake; (b) Moderate earthquake; and (c) Major earthquake.

bars in Fig. 16, and it is noted that the drift responses tend to be
discrete under bigger earthquake hazard levels.
Cumulative distribution function (CDF) is used to evaluate the
peak drift responses. For a specific hazard level, the group of peak
drift responses from time-history analyses were fitted to a lognor-
mal distribution as given by Eq. (2),
 
ln x  l
F X x U
g non-structural components. The median peak floor accelerations
where U is the cumulative distribution function; l and n are log-
arithmic distribution parameters, which is obtained by a maximum
likelihood procedure. Fig. 17 shows the CDFs of maximum inter-
story drift responses. Similar as discussed earlier, the CDFs indicate
distinct difference between the minor earthquake hazard level and
the moderate/major earthquake hazard level. From another aspect
of view, if the performance objectives under moderate or major
earthquake hazard level was defined as the average drift response
of the undamped structure (i.e. this means the failure probability
of the undamped structure is 50%), then the failure probability of
damped structure can be reduced to less than 5% due to the utiliza-
tion of dampers.
5.5. Floor acceleration response
Floor acceleration response is considered as another important
performance indicator since it is directly related to the damage of
acceleration-sensitive components (e.g. mechanical equipment,
etc.). Fig. 18 shows the CDFs of floor acceleration responses.
HAZUS-MH MR5 [26] has defined the damage states (i.e. slight,
2 moderate, extensive, and complete) for acceleration-sensitive
associated with these four damage states are 0.3 g, 0.6 g, 1.2 g,
and 2.4 g, respectively. Detailed information and description for
these damage states can be found in [26]. The average peak floor
accelerations of both structures under the minor earthquake level
are less than 0.3 g, indicating very little damage for acceleration-
sensitive components. The average peak floor acceleration of the
undamped structure is 0.62 g, which corresponds to the moderate
damage state, while the average peak floor acceleration of the
damped structure is obtained as 0.53 g, indicating a slight to mod-
erate damage state. For major earthquake level, the peak floor
acceleration response of the damped structure is also about 25%
smaller than that of the undamped structure. It is noted that the

Fig. 18. Peak floor acceleration distributions under: (a) Minor earthquake; (b) Moderate earthquake; and (c) Major earthquake.
 Z. Li et al. / Engineering Structures 151 (2017) 3343
dampers showed a significant effect on reducing floor acceleration
responses, thus the damage of acceleration vulnerable components
in the damped structure is expected to be controlled near the mod-
erate damage state with an average peak floor acceleration (0.71 g)
just a little bit larger than 0.6 g.
6. Conclusions
This paper proposes a type of hybrid structural system that con-
sists of steel frame and infill wood shear walls, and friction dam-
pers are used as frame-to-wall connectors to mitigate
earthquake-induced damage. A series of cyclic loading tests were
carried out on timber-steel hybrid lateral load-resisting subassem-
blies. Test results showed that since the friction dampers were
quite effective on dissipating earthquake input energy, much less
damage was observed within the main structural members. An
optimal damper design solution was provided for a four-story
timber-steel hybrid building based on nonlinear time-history anal-
yses, and the seismic performance of the prototype structure was
comprehensively evaluated based on numerical simulations. For
comparison, the seismic responses of the prototype structure with-
out dampers (i.e. undamped structure) were also simulated.
Results showed that the drift and acceleration responses of the
damped structure under minor earthquakes were almost identical
to those of the undamped structure, indicating the dampers acted
as stiff shear connectors at this stage. As expected, the dampers
activated under moderate and major earthquakes, and both the
inter-story drift and floor acceleration of the structure were signif-
icantly reduced. This study aims to provide feasible solutions for
upgrading the seismic performance of timber-steel hybrid struc-
tures, and the presented results may serve as technical basis for
the development of guidelines for using such structural system
in practical engineering.
Acknowledgement
The authors gratefully acknowledge Shanghai Sailing Program
(Grant No. 16YF1411800), Tongji University Civil Engineering
International Collaborative Research Fund (Grant No.
0200121005/009) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities (Grant No: 2015KJ005) for supporting this research.
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