Does a small wood-frame house have enough shear wall for wind and earthquakes once the windows and doors are cut out?
research/house-structure
Does a small wood-frame house have enough shear wall for wind and earthquakes once the openings are cut out? At 115 mph and SDS 0.50 the 28 x 40 ft house uses 19% of a gable-wall line's capacity at 6 in nailing; the openings, not the load, are what shrink it. Stylised, capacities from memory.
What it found
Wind and seismic base shear on the house-framing house (28 × 40 ft, one storey) against the segmented shear-wall length its openings leave. At 115 mph and SDS 0.50 the worst case uses 19% of a gable-wall line's capacity at the loosest (6 in) nailing; wind must reach 264 mph before that nailing runs out. Lateral load does not govern this plan, but glazing does: four windows per gable wall cut the usable wall from 24 ft to 11 ft, six leave none. A 16 ft garage door in the gable wall raises the load share to 41% at 6 in nailing, and a centred 22 ft door needs tighter nailing. Advanced and conventional framing carry the same shear. Stylised: the nailing table and load coefficients are from memory and unchecked, and diaphragms, uplift and overturning are not modelled.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.