Boosting use of cross-laminated timber in high seismic regions through development of a shear wall system
A cross-laminated timber shear wall system ready for implementation.
Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), a new-generation engineered wood product, offers several advantages to the wood building market: CLT panels are environmentally friendly, locally sourced, mass produced using advanced manufacturing processes, and can increase construction speeds. These sustainable wood panels consisting of laminations glued together orthogonally have the potential to replace steel and concrete in constructing midrise buildings.
Despite these advantages, the lack of an approved CLT design approach was limiting widespread adoption of CLT in North America. One area that required attention was the development of a CLT lateral force resisting system that could be used in seismic and high-wind regions of the United States and would be incorporated in design codes.
Beginning in 2013, research engineers from the Forest Products Laboratory collaborated with academic and industry researchers to address this issue. Through a systematic and iterative research effort, they developed and validated a CLT shear wall design method along with the required seismic design parameters. This process involved developing a suite of CLT building archetypes, crafting a new design methodology, testing components and systems, developing and validating nonlinear static and dynamic structural modeling and incremental time history analyses, and incorporating uncertainties.
From this effort, a CLT seismic force resisting system was approved via the consensus process of ASCE 7 and incorporated into the 2024 International Building Code, which is the most widely used model building code in the United States. This is only the second wood-based seismic force resisting system ever approved and helps more widespread adoption of CLT in North America.