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 requires nonlinear analysis to predict performance,
and assessment of earthquake risk for regions and individual structures often requires 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 model for simulating the earthquake response of planar walls. Jupyter
notebooks were used to create and run OpenSees models of individual walls included in an
experimental dataset published in the NHERI DesignSafe-CI DataDepot, and Jupyter notebooks
were used to 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 the creation of the Jupyter notebooks can support
future projects.
Two-page summary: click here.
Download full report: click here.
Full List of PEER Reports: click here.
