Structural Robustness of Timber Buildings

The number of storeys in timber buildings are increasing. With more storeys, structural robustness needsmore attention, to make a building survive unforeseen events (e.g. accidents, terrorism) and save lives. The state of theart regarding robustness of concrete and steel buildings seems to be rather refined, but for timber buildings, theliterature appears to be quite limited. This study aims to review the design methods for robustness of timber buildings.First, the terminology and definitions are introduced. Then, the state of the art for design methods for robustness ingeneral are presented. Finally, the design methods for timber buildings are discussed and compared to those from otherbuilding materials. The results indicate that the guidelines for light timber-frame buildings are more refined than thosefor post and beam and cross-laminated timber buildings. Regarding robustness, the latter two construction types exhibitcertain similarities to steel frames and precast concrete buildings respectively. For timber, ductile connections can beused to avoid brittle timber failure after local damages, which resembles the approach of seismic design. Future researchin robustness should focus on the connection details in multi-storey timber buildings.Bioinnovation 4.