Engineering
Assessing Seismic Resilience of Modular Steel Buildings with Moment-Resisting Frames
Quick fact
In modular steel buildings, the floor diaphragms are not continuous—each module has its own floor slab, leaving a gap at the seams. This interruption in the diaphragm can significantly reduce the building's lateral stiffness and change its seismic load path, which is a key reason why seismic resilience assessment must treat them as a distinct structural system.
Why this is interesting
Modular steel buildings are assembled like giant LEGO blocks from prefabricated boxes, but when an earthquake strikes, their behavior can be radically different from a conventional steel frame. Why would a structure that is so regular in appearance behave so unpredictably?