Shear Wall Layout Optimization in Coordination with Architectural Floor Plans

Abstract

The cement industry represents the third largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions in the world. A majority of this cement is used in reinforced concrete construction for the creation of building structures and infrastructure. The increasing urbanization of cities is driving the need to build significantly more tall buildings. Consequentially, the production of concrete is continuing to increase. As buildings grow taller the lateral system becomes a more significant component of the structural system. Shear walls are a prominent lateral system, but they are large and cumbersome components and thus present architects with a challenge when trying to position shear walls in their floor layouts. Optimizing the lateral system of a tall building is critical, as its material usage increases exponentially with height. Currently, the shear wall design process is inefficient and very cyclical. As a shear wall layout’s structural behavior is dependent on its topology, when the architect is developing the floor layout they have limited insight into how the associated shear wall layout will perform structurally. Thus, it is unlikely that the arrived upon solution will be optimal. The goal of this research is to create an optimization method to reduce the material usage of shear wall layouts that operates quickly enough that it could be integrated into a design tool to mitigate the cyclical design process currently being used. This paper implements a variation on the level set method. As the problem is very discontinuous due to the nature of the shear walls, we can use the level set method to create a more continuous objective function. This will help with the computational performance of the optimization, as well as allow us to later add additional functionality by being able to access the gradients of the objective function. The method presented in this paper is tested by performing method experiments and creating design applications.