Abstract Summary
The climate emergency and potential carbon-positive nature of timber as a construction material are driving the design and construction of multi-storey buildings made entirely or predominantly of timber. However, to the lightweight relatively low stiffness of timber, wind-induced vibrations are becoming the governing design criterion of tall timber buildings. However, mass timber is an organic construction material and as such is quite unusual yielding many complexities for designers trying to use it in mainstream construction of multi-storey buildings. In particular, there is a need to understand amplitude-dependent behaviour and related modal properties of multi-storey timber buildings. These are needed for the calculation of wind-induced lateral sway vibrations of multi-storey timber buildings. This paper describes the use of a novel FRF-based modal testing of the highest timber building in the world in operation using wireless accelerometers. This kind of testing was not attempted before on a structure of this size and in operation, as appropriate when investigating vibration serviceability behaviour.
