WOODEN TORNADO SAFE ROOM WALLS MODELING AND DESIGN

Abstract

A safe room is a room in a residence or place of business designed to provide shelter to the occupants of the building in the event of a tornado or hurricane. Currently walls for these rooms are made of cast-in-place concrete, concrete masonry units {CMU} with concrete infill, a combination of wooden studs and plywood with concrete infill, or a combination of wooden studs and plywood with steel sheet metal. Keeping costs low is important to encourage construction of safe rooms, and these Federal Emergency Management Agency {FEMA} approved wall sections may be difficult or expensive to retrofit into an existing building. Thus, a safe room design that uses only materials found at a home improvement store with a lumberyard is potentially needed. Previous studies of safe room wall sections have relied on a trial and error, build and test, approach to design. This approach has resulted in approved wall sections, but required many tests to find a small number of designs that were suitable. The intent of this project is to establish a simple design procedure for wooden safe room walls that compares expected physical parameters of the wall to minimum thresholds that define the pass/fail behavior of the wall. Approaching design of safe room walls in this manner may decrease the number of tests required to find a passing wall design.