Progressive collapse (Robustness) behaviour of mid-rise mass timber frame buildings

With recent changes in legislations, mid-rise to tall timber buildings have gained international attention. As the height of timber buildings increases, so do their potential risks of progressive collapse. While the progressive collapse mechanisms of concrete and steel buildings have been widely researched, limited studies have been carried out on mass timber buildings. A three years project has been recently funded by the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Research Hub on tall timber buildings, Australia, to investigate the progressive collapse mechanisms of mid-rise mass timber frame buildings. This paper presents a short literature review on reported major collapse events of timber buildings and introduces current design guidelines. The scheduled experimental and numerical investigations of the project are introduced. The preliminary results on 2D frames aiming at understanding the frame behaviour under a column removal scenario and large displacements are presented and discussed.