Innovation in the Sustainable Design Process of Earthquake Resistant Buildings: From Topology Optimization to Staged Construction Analysis

Abstract

<p> Prescriptive design in seismic regions requires the adherence to stringent criteria and detailing requirements in order to achieve sufficient ductility, redundancy and life-safety performance. In this environment, structural engineers have to rely on innovative solutions to satisfy the increasing expectations on sustainability and aesthetics while maintaining the target budget and schedule.</p><p> In this paper, innovative concepts are applied to the design of a courthouse facility. Consisting of a reinforced concrete shear wall system, the building has perimeter columns suspended from a 5 meter deep roof truss. The site presented severe seismic demands, and buckling restrained braces were utilized at the top story to control seismic drifts. Optimization algorithms and staged construction analysis were applied to achieve the most efficient and practical gravity design of the truss.</p>

Topology Optimisation in Structural Steel Design for Additive Manufacturing

“…Such could be regarded as a surprise, since the seismic design is undoubtedly more complex and demanding compared with static loading common cases but may be explained by the resourcefulness of TO addressing complex issues which, otherwise, would hardly be efficiently solved with analytical means. Among the aforementioned works, one can highlight the steel frames optimisation by Memari and Madhkhan [86], more recent studies of space structures under seismic loads with evolutionary approaches [87,88], a comparison of different soft computing algorithms by Liu and Li, taking infrastructures lifelines as the study object [89], as well as Sarkisian et al's well-known mastery for innovative solutions, materialised in the use of TO for meeting significant seismic, aesthetical, budgetary, and regulatory demands for a specific building [90].…”

Topology Optimisation of Structural Steel with Non-Penalisation SEMDOT: Optimisation, Physical Nonlinear Analysis, and Benchmarking

“…While TO is already a fundamental step in the industrial design of products for such sectors as automotive, defence, aerospace, medical devices, and new materials design, it is yet to become commonplace in civil and large structural engineering endeavours. Hence, as we face the dawn of TO usage for construction [14], influenced not only by architects' taste for genuine and meaningful shapes [15][16][17][18] but also by the progress made in codecompliant TO [19][20][21] and TO for multiple loadings [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], civil engineering structures can be regarded as the ideal ground for testing new TO solutions.…”