Tsunami bore forces on a compliant residential building model

The forces exerted on light-frame wood buildings as a result of surge and waves are not fully understood. With a better understanding of these types of forces, it may eventually be possible to build coastal structures to better withstand the loads. In this paper, a recent two part experimental study that focused on determining the forces induced in a structurally compliant model of a typical Gulf Coast residential building is summarized. The one-sixth scale building was designed to approximately behave as the full scale building would under wave loading using rules of energy-based similitude. The compliant model was subjected to solitary wave loading in the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) tsunami wave basin (TWB) at Oregon State University with wave heights ranging from 0.1 m to 0.6 m. Then, at Colorado State University, lateral force–deformation tests on a nominally identical model were performed in order to determine the force–deformation relationship for the building. The structural deformation produced by solitary waves in the wave basin was combined with the experimentally measured deformation in the structural laboratory to determine the force induced by the waves between 0.2m and 0.6 m. Finally, a simplified force equation constant similar to the existing design code formats was found to be 0.31.