Steel framed apartment buildings with applications of wood

A new apartment building that is a steel framed structure with applications of wooden materials is suggested to instead of the conventional mid-to-high-rise reinforced concrete (RC) one. This aims at the solution of the basic problems in rebuilding apartment buildings in Japan because the recyclable materials steel and wood are adopted. One of the purposes of this paper is to examine the possibilities of using Japanese cedar as finishing material and fire-protection for the steel framed apartment building by fire resistance test on steel tube columns. The maximum temperature of steel tube columns covered by cedar was 570°C during the fire resistance test. This means that the cedar cannot be used as fire-protective material according to the current Japanese regulations because the maximum temperature of structural members is higher than 450°C. However, there is another evaluation method of fire resistance, which is the loaded fire resistance test. The possibilities of fire resistant design for the proposed steel tube columns covered by cedar are discussed by comparing with the results of loaded fire resistance tests of the previous researches. Another main purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of the proposed steel framed apartment building with a conventional RC one. It shows that the proposed structure was of the same structural performance, habitability, and sound insulation class as the RC one.