This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will create innovative building technology that will enable mass timber modular construction as a building solution to many of the issues the nation's major cities face today. The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector is on the cusp of a significant disruption that will change the way buildings are manufactured, assembled, and designed, the catalyst of which is the integration of building information models (BIM) and automated construction and manufacturing. This disruption will significantly impact structural engineers. With the streamlining of building manufacturing, assembling, and design, engineers will need to take advantage of three opportunities: (1) design for constructability, (2) design for manufacturing, and (3) design for the whole life of the building (considering future modifications, maintenance, and easily replacing parts of the building). Modular construction, as one method to take advantage of these three opportunities, can address labor and housing shortages that exist in almost every U.S. city today and also can provide rapid construction methods for post-disaster reconstruction and additional patient care facilities. This research will contribute to the state of Oregon’s economy, which has made significant investments in mass timber production, manufacturing, and research. This research will be complemented through the development of best practices for using interdisciplinary, collaborative classroom environments to enhance engineering identities of underrepresented minorities and women at the graduate level. This award will support the National Science Foundation (NSF) role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program.
The specific goal of this research is to develop a novel framework for robust and ductile mass timber modular construction that can be applied to buildings with varying lateral force resisting systems. Through this framework, the relationship between the rigidity of modular interconnections and overall structural behavior will be investigated. The research objectives of this project are to: (1) quantify the demands in interconnections that provide ductility when the building framing is subjected to combined gravity and lateral forces (seismic and wind); (2) quantify the impact of interconnection configuration and design on the ability of interconnections to meet the strength and serviceability performance criteria for mass timber high-rise modular buildings; (3) quantify ductility and overstrength for mass timber modular construction and explore applicability of conventional seismic performance factors and how these factors influence the adjusted collapse margin ratio for archetype buildings; (4) explore the influence of interconnection stiffness on the behavior of high-rise modular mass timber buildings subjected to wind demands; and (5) explore the relationship between team-focused and interdisciplinary educational practices with engineering identity and knowledge retention. New connection technology will be created and its contribution to the overall building behavior will be investigated through a rigorous testing plan and complex physics-based numerical simulations of archetype buildings subjected to combined gravity and lateral loads (seismic and wind). This research is a critical first step to develop innovative technology that will change how buildings are designed, manufactured, and assembled. This project will enable the Principal Investigator to establish interdisciplinary research, teaching, and mentorship in the area of mass timber and hybrid construction. This research will use the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel facility at the University of Florida. Experimental datasets will be archived in the NHERI Data Depot (www.DesignSafe-ci.org) and made publicly available.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
