SeismicSafe
The tool is intended to help developers/architects/engineers/home owner to leverage on the building footprint, story height, and first story wall opening to rapidly generate design of buildings that avoid soft story failure tragedies under earthquake and at the same time provide optimum wall opening area on the first floor for retail space. Seismic Safe is very easy to use with just 3 variable inputs: First Story Height, First Story Wall Opening Width Per Bay, and Building Depth. It automatically calculate 2 outputs which are First Story Wall Opening Area Ratio and First Story Interstory Drift Ratio. Other parameters are set constant for simplicity, such as wall thickness, bay width, 2nd/3rd floor height, material property of reinforced concrete, and spectral acceleration. These parameters can be easily changed to input variable and generate more design options if you purchase a premium version of SeismicSafe. The building is assumed to have shear wall as lateral force resisting system and therefore used simplified equation for stiffness and drift calculations.
The following snapshot provides an example of what the optimization results look like:
The Y-axis is first story height and the X-axis is first story shear wall opening width, which are two of the more important variable inputs. The size of dots shows the first story interstory drift ratio and the color indicates the wall opening ratio. For example, the big blue dot means a high interstory drift ratio and high wall opening ratio, while the orange dot means low interstory drift and low opening ratio.
Video Instruction