PEER has published Report No. 2024/11: "Evaluation and Calibration of an OpenSees Layered Shell Element Model for Simulating the Earthquake Response of Flexure-Controlled Reinforced Concrete Walls." It was authored by Joshua Stokley, Boeing Corporation and Laura Lowes, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
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Abstract
Reinforced concrete walls are used commonly to resist lateral loads; often, concrete walls have three-dimensional configurations to maximize stiffness and strength. Seismic design, evaluation, and retrofit of concrete wall structures often require nonlinear analysis to predict performance; assessment of earthquake risk for regions and for individual structures often require nonlinear analysis to predict damage, loss of functionality, and repair time and cost. This report presents the results of a research study in which high-performance cloud-computing resources were used to calibrate an OpenSees Version 3.3.0 model for simulating the earthquake response of planar walls. Jupyter notebooks were used to create OpenSees models of individual walls included in an experimental dataset published in the NHERI DesignSafe-CI DataDepot, and Jupyter notebooks were used to visualize results and define error functions for the model calibration effort. Creation of an efficient research workflow was enabled by use of the NHERI SimCenter quoFEM software. Computational time was reduced by using cloud computing resources provided by the NHERI DesignSafe-CI facility. Results of the effort include recommendations for modeling walls to provide accurate simulation of response and a series of Jupyter notebooks that can support future projects.