Validation of Finite-Element Analyses for Storm Shelters
Publication: Journal of Architectural Engineering
Volume 12, Issue 2
Abstract
The Federal Emergency Management Agency Publication 320, Taking shelter from the storm: Building a safe room inside your house, presents a number of prescriptive designs for residential tornado shelters and specifies building materials commonly found in residential construction in the United States. The design and structural analysis of the shelters was based on simplified and conservative analytical methods and on the results of numerous impact tests on shelter components at the Wind Engineering Research Center at Texas Tech University. This paper compares predictions of structural displacements using a commercial finite-element analysis software package with experimental data taken from the full-scale testing of the aboveground concrete masonry unit (CMU) and timber-steel shelters. The reliability and usefulness of the finite-element analysis method in analyzing aboveground residential shelters under extreme wind loading is verified by these results. It is therefore suggested that finite-element analysis has the potential to be used in designing CMU and timber-steel shelters of different sizes and configurations without the need for physical testing to design loads.
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Acknowledgment
The writers gratefully acknowledge the support of NIST in making this research possible.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Architectural Engineering
Volume 12 • Issue 2 • June 2006
Pages: 64 - 71
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: Mar 1, 2004
Accepted: Jul 18, 2005
Published online: Jun 1, 2006
Published in print: Jun 2006
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