Search

The NEES-Soft project is a five-university industry-collaborative project that has several major objectives including full-scale system-level validation of several stiffness/strength-based retrofit approaches. Within the project several major test programs were performed. This paper summarizes the results of the NEES-Soft retrofit test program which included hybrid testing of a three-story soft-story woodframe building at NEES@Buffalo and shake table testing of four-story soft-story woodframe building at NEES@UCSD, both culminating in 2013. Retrofits included three different types of added components including a steel special moment frame, a cantilevered column, and a cross laminated timber rocking wall system with steel anchor rods. Each of these retrofits was designed with specific building performance objectives ranging from damage with shelter-in-place to virtually undamaged. Two different performance objectives were targeted depending on the retrofit type: One was the FEMA P807 retrofit guideline which is currently applicable to the mandatory soft-story woodframe retrofit in san Francisco, and the other is a performance-based seismic retrofit (PBSR). The PBSR either eliminates torsion or accounts for it by assuming a superposition of the story drift caused by translation and rotation. Experimental results from both test programs will be presented and the performance of each retrofit compared with the pre-test performance expectations.