IT13: Nurture Design Creativity and Innovation

May 7, 2024 | 11:00am - 12:00pm PT

About the Webinar

This webinar will present the work of the BSSC’s Provisional Update Committee, Issue Team 13. IT 13 is tasked with exploring ways to Nurture Design Creativity and Innovation and facilitate the design of novel seismic systems, while ensuring safety. The initial work product is a Behavior-based Design Method, intended to directly utilize non-linear behavior, explicit mechanisms, capacity design, and so forth. It is to be less complicated than an alternative means of compliance, and thus avoid the necessity of peer review and non-linear response-history analyses.

It is also intended to be less opaque than the Rules-based prescriptive code design process. While the method is preliminary, and in the proof-of-concept stage, it synthesizes several important design topics. If a designer proposes a novel lateral system, he/she would test it with the following six steps:

1. Select a suitable set of global strength-ductility requirements, that would be safe against collapse, for a specific hazard. This is a Universal R-Cd Design Space, that would allow more options than the recognized code systems. This proposed design space builds on non-linear static methods and would be benchmarked with FEMA P-695.
2. Establish the system’s mechanism, using capacity design. This includes requirements to ensure that a SDOF simplification is suitable and reliable. This step is the linkage from global non-linear demands to local non-linear component demands.
3. Account for the potential of increased local ductility demands due to both plan and vertical irregularities.
4. Characterize the non-linear components (fuses/plastic hinges) using ASCE 41 as a catalog of tested non-linear elements with defined strength, and deflection limits.
5. Allow and design for stable foundation nonlinearity, such as from rocking and so forth. Iterate until the system is strong and tough enough to be reliably safe.
6. Explicitly check the deflection compatibility of the gravity systems.

The webinar will present the concepts underlying the Design Method, as well as various studies being used to develop the details and limitations of the method.

About the Presenter

David Mar is the founder of Mar Structural Design, in Berkeley California. He has practiced over thirty years, after receiving his BS and MS at U.C. Berkeley. His practice is known for creativity and innovation, especially in the areas of performance-based design. The firm’s portfolio includes numerous examples of seismically resilient rocking self-centering systems, as well as spine retrofit systems. He was the Project Technical Director of FEMA P-807, Guidance and Recommendations for the Evaluation and Retrofit of Multi-Unit Wood-Frame Buildings with Weak First Stories. David is the Chair of PUC Issue Team 13.