ABSTRACT

Shear wall-frame systems are lateral force-resisting systems that are widely-used in mid-rise and high-rise structures. The objective of the study is to develop a model generation procedure for these systems using a combined quadtree and octree partitioning. The procedure leads to efficient placement of multiresolution mesh (voxel and tetrahedron) elements, with constraints provided by dimensions and material designation of the structural elements. Two models of a 10-story structure with different arrangement of shear walls and columns were considered as demonstrative example. The results show that the procedure is capable of generating meshed models with high resolution, thereby allowing for modeling the local variations in structure response. The obtained low computation time of mesh generation of million finite elements show the advantage of the developed procedure, which is expected to contribute to improving the computational efficiency of an entire model generation-analysis process.