Design Optimization to Minimize Material Usage in Steel Buildings Subjected to Lateral Loads

Abstract This chapter presents a comprehensive approach to optimizing steel usage for reducing the environmental impact of building structures, aligned with sustainable development goals. The study focuses on developing the structural design of members with optimization methods to reduce steel usage, leading to lightweight structural systems while minimizing carbon footprints in the built environment. This study identifies optimum cross-sectional dimensions of structural sections to withstand lateral wind loads. For that purpose, a nonlinear programming solver is used. This solver is robust in finding the minimum of a constrained nonlinear multivariate function. The volume of the structural steel is taken as the objective function to ensure sustainability, while two constraints of demand to capacity indices of structural members as a strength condition and inter-story drift ratio as a serviceability constraint are taken to meet performance criteria, such as safety and cost-effectiveness designing process. The results show that this optimized design tool can effectively reduce the weight of structural steel usage, paving the way to achieve both sustainable and resilient buildings.