Validating Wood3D for an Easier Yet More Accurate Way to Model Wood Buildings

There is a growing demand for affordable housing using light frame wood, since wood is a light, sustainable and cost-effective material. The Province of Ontario has recently allowed for buildings of up to six stories of wood. Compared to other commonly found building materials, wood is extremely complicated. This makes wood building much more challenging to design and check how safe they will be. Current design methods for wood buildings rely mainly on manual calculations and simplified steps, while accurate methods require time-consuming detailed modelling. Thus, Wood3D is an in-house developed software that allows for easier yet accurate modelling of wood buildings. To validate, or check the accuracy of, Wood3D, two buildings with different wall sizes were first created and modelled using Wood3D. The mass of the buildings was then calculated by hand and compared to the value from Wood3D. There was a small, but acceptable, difference. This shows that Wood3D can accurately calculate a building's mass, and this leads to the correct amount of wind and earthquake that a building can resist. Next, wind and earthquake loads were applied on the buildings and the analysis was run using Wood3D. It was found that Wood3D distributes the loads correctly to the floors and then the walls, and the program can indicate how strong each wall will be. This successful output shows that Wood3D is a reliable software that allows for faster, easier, and accurate modelling of wood buildings. This is an important step that further contributes to accelerating affordable housing.