I am making a model to evaluate the response of a building to seismic action.

I have been working on the model on ETABS for more than 9 months now, but I have run into a problem I haven't been able to figure out.

Quick Description:

  • This building has 17 stories, two basements which are parking spaces, a mix of flat waffle slabs in some stories and regular slabs on other stories.
  • As soil-structure interaction is not within the scope of this work, and considering that I want to evaluate only the seismic response of the building. I did not consider the pile foundation that exists in the real building, I considered every element to be in a fixed support.

PROBLEM 1: When viewing shear forces – relative only to the dead load – (VMAX) on some floors I get abnormally high values (in the range of thousands), and on the other floors in the range of hundreds.

PROBLEM 2: Some of the areas in the mesh present empty spaces (blank mesh elements) within the mesh when the dimension of the mesh is 1.25m. Is this normal?

Should I just ignore these abnormalities and keep on going, or is there a solution to these problems?

More details:

  • Shell Mesh Type: General Mesh, 1.25m
  • Frame Meshing: Automatic
  • Load applied in VMAX (Resultant Forces): Dead Load
  • Countour averaging at nodes: None (I have tried the other options as well)
  • Reinforced concrete columns (modeled as frame elements)
  • Reinforced concrete waffle slab (modeled as Shells)
  • Reinforced concrete shear walls (modeled as Walls)
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