A procedure for rapid visual screening for seismic safety of wood-frame dwellings with plan irregularity

This paper highlights the development of a rapid visual screening (RVS) tool to quickly identify, inventory, and rank residential buildings that are potentially seismically hazardous, focusing on single-family, wood-frame dwellings with plan irregularity. The SAPWood software was used to perform a series of nonlinear time-history analyses for 480 representative models, covering different combinations of plan shapes, numbers of floors, base-rectangular areas, shape aspect ratio, area percentage cutoffs, window and door openings, and garage doors. The evolutionary parameter hysteresis model was used to represent the load–displacement relationship of structural panel-sheathed shear walls and a 10 parameter CUREE hysteresis model for gypsum wallboard sheathed walls. Ten pairs of ground motion time histories were used and scaled to four levels of spectral acceleration at 0.167, 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 g. An average seismic performance grade for each model was generated based on the predicted maximum shear wall drifts. Five seismic performance grades: 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0, are associated with the 1% immediate occupancy drift limit, 2% life safety limit, 3% collapse prevention limit, 10% drift, and exceeding 10% drift, respectively. The obtained average seismic performance grades were used to develop a new RVS tool that is applicable for checking the seismic performance of either existing or newly designed single-family, wood-frame dwellings. It examines the adequacy of the structure’s exterior shear walls to resist lateral forces resulting from ground motions, including torsional forces induced from plan irregularity.

► Approach to screening for seismic hazards in wood houses with plan irregularity is developed.
► SAPWood is used for the analysis platform to investigate a wide variety of configurations.
► Plan shape, number of stories, plan area, cutoffs in area, and wall openings are investigated.