Parametrized Finite Element Simulation of Multi-Storey Timber Structures

Abstract: With the acceleration of global urbanization trends, more and more intentions are put on multi-storey buildings. As the world leading area of wood construction, European countries started the construction of multi-storey timber building for a decade ago. However, unlike the traditional buildings made of reinforced concrete, the design of wooden high-rise timber buildings would face a substantial amount of new challenges because such high-rise timber buildings are touching the limitations of the timber engineering field. In this thesis, a parameterized three-dimensional FE-model (in ABAQUS) of a multi-storey timber frame building is created. Variable geometrical parameters, connection stiffness as well as boundary connections and applied wind and gravity loads are defined in a Python script to make it possible to analyze the influence of these parameters on the global structural behavior of the studied multi-storey timber frame building. The results and analysis implied that the script successfully worked and was capable to create different complex building geometries in an wasy way for the finite element analysis.