Discontinuous Lateral Walls

Lateral walls are not always stacked in a building.  LAVA automatically detects this situation and distributes the lateral forces to the levels below.  

The shear walls will transfer their loads below automatically to the supporting elements in this order of priority.

Shear Wall —>

1. Shear Line

2. Shear Wall

3. Diaphragm

In a stacked wall scenario, the Shear Line or Shear Wall will be found below to transfer the lateral loads.

However, in a discontinuous lateral wall situation, the diaphragm distributes the lateral load.

Flexible: The distribution of the load through the diaphragm is proportional to the distance to the shear line/shear wall.  

Rigid: The loads go into the diaphragm and the forces are distributed based on the stiffness of the walls attached below.  

Example Discontinuous Lateral Walls in LAVA

You can see this scenario by following the load path in LAVA.  For example, this is a flexible diaphragm model that has a shear wall on the roof level with a wall SW.RF0.5 that has no shear line or shear wall below.

Roof Floor Plan:

Floor Plan 1 (below):

The Floor Plan 1, diaphragm shows the reaction from the shear wall SW.RF0.5 into the diaphragm.

The diaphragm distributes the forces proportionally to the shear lines on the Floor Plan 1.

You can see the Lateral Load from Above in the Shear lines on this lower level.

After entering the Shear Line, the load then gets distributed to the walls attached to that shear line. These walls are equal sizes and distributed equally from the Shear line with it noted that the load is “abv from”.