Seismic response of a light steel structure integrated building with steel mortise–tenon connections

Abstract

Mortise–tenon joints play a crucial role in traditional timber structures to resist service and earthquake loading. In this work, the steel mortise–tenon connection from a traditional timber house was extracted and developed for a lightweight steel structure integrated building. This article presents a study on the dynamic performance of an integrated steel house with steel mortise–tenon connections. A shaking table test was conducted with a full-scale model and various excitation intensities. Various parameters, including the natural frequency, the equivalent stiffness of the structure, the structural damping ratio, the acceleration response and the displacement response, were analysed and discussed. In the test, the model frequencies decreased from 15.19 to less than 13.38 Hz, while the damping ratio increased by 32.6%. The test model survived all the input earthquake excitations (peak ground acceleration of up to 1.0g) with only minor damage, indicating the good seismic resilience of the building. The test results demonstrate that the integrated house structure with steel mortise–tenon connections is a good solution for withstanding earthquakes. An integrated structure bounded by a steel mortise–tenon system with proper design typically exhibits good seismic behaviour and can resist earthquake under different seismic levels in practice.