Ambient Vibration Measurement Data of a Four Story Mass Timber Building
Ambient vibration from wind, traffic, and human activities results into low levels of building motion. As a result, ambient vibration collected data have been used to extract dynamic characteristics of a wide array of civil engineering structures. Among these, a few dynamic characterization tests have been performed on timber building structures, but only a few focused on mass timber structures using different types of engineered wood products for the gravity and/or lateral load resisting systems (Worth et al. 2012; Reynolds et al. 2015, 2016) Since there is a growing interest in design and construction of mass timber structures for multi story buildings, it is important to provide dynamic data obtained from actual constructed projects. The dynamic features of buildings have lead researchers and design professionals to gain knowledge of how structures behave under ambient excitations offering guidance on serviceability performance and insights on the structural performance of structures under high winds and seismic loading. Serviceability performance are of particular relevance for mass timber buildings when compared to conventional concrete and steel buildings, due to the lack of available data. Dynamic data for this type of building is necessary to understand the influence of overall mass, stiffness, and mass distribution on the modal parameters of the structure (frequencies, damping, and mode shapes) especially. The availability of these data can contribute to the effective design of mass timber buildings to ambient and wind induced vibrations and the consequent occupant comfort and safety. In the past decade, cross laminated timber (CLT) has been adopted for structural assemblies of some North American multi story buildings. One of these projects is the "Albina Yard," a fourstory building located in Portland, OR, which is the first multi story construction built using U.S. manufactured cross laminated timber (CLT) floor systems. There is currently a lack of open access test data on existing buildings using mass timber technology. This study addresses this research need. Ambient vibration data were collected on the "Albina Yard," providing one of the few dynamic dataset for a U.S. building constructed using CLT members. An application and discussion of these data using two operational modal analysis (OMA) methods is presented in Mugabo et al. (2019)1. In the cited study, dynamic characteristics of the Albina Yard building were obtained, using the Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition (EFDD; Brincker et al. 2001) and the Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI; Brincker and Andersen, 2006) methods. However, other OMA approaches could be used and results compared to those presented in Mugabo et al. (2019)1. In addition, these collected data can be used for benchmarking future finite element modeling to estimate building performance under extreme loading. For this reason, the complete dynamic dataset for the Albina Yard building is provided to the wider research community for further investigation and dynamic data analyses.
Front. Built Environ.