Effects of Reference Displacement and Damage Accumulation in Wood Shear Walls

The objectives of this study were: (1) to evaluate the effect of reference displacement on wall behavior under fully reversed cyclic loading using the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) test protocol and (2) to assess damage accumulation for the imposed drift levels. Three walls were tested under monotonic loads to determine reference displacements. Four sets of tests, each consisting of two wall specimens, were conducted using the CUREE protocol with four different reference displacements. Results show that the reference displacement can influence wall strength by up to 15% while there was little or no effect on stiffness and area under the backbone curve. Three additional tests were conducted using a segmented version of the CUREE protocol to provide a way to correlate visible damage and stiffness degradation to imposed drifts. Results show that while visible damage was minimal at drifts as high as 1%, (8% of nails slightly damaged), a 52% reduction in secant stiffness had occurred.