Engineering Structures Featured Paper Award

Great news to share: our paper "Dynamic amplification of isolated shear walls: Insights from layered shell modeling", published in Engineering Structures (Volume 358, 122641), has been selected for a Featured Paper Award by the journal's Editors-in-Chief.

Congratulations to the whole team: Patricio Palacios B., Nicolás Mora Bowen, Rafael Delpiano, and myself. This was a genuinely collaborative effort, from building and validating the high-fidelity layered shell models through running the ~1,460-model parametric campaign and making sense of the statistical correlations that came out of it.

For anyone catching up, the paper asks a simple but consequential question: when we design shear walls using a single, constant response-modification factor $R$ across all vibration modes, how much are we missing? Our answer, built on a large parametric study, is quite a bit in some cases — amplification factors ranged from about 1.0 to 2.75 depending on wall geometry and axial load, and the single best predictor we found for that amplification was the normalized position of the resultant lateral force, which correlates only partially with story count the way ACI 318-19/25 formulations implicitly assume.

If you want the full story, we recorded a journal club walkthrough of the paper:

Citation: Patricio Palacios B., Nicolás Mora Bowen, Rafael Delpiano, José A. Abell. Dynamic amplification of isolated shear walls: Insights from layered shell modeling. Engineering Structures, Volume 358, 1 July 2026, 122641. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2026.122641