Finite Element Method

In order to figure out where more reinforcement was necessary, or where beams could be taken away, I looked at the von-mises (combination loading) stress across the home-wall structure. This is what led to the design decision to add 2x4 studs perpendicular to the supporting arms, which reduced bowing of the structure as it added more material farther away from the axis experiencing the highest bending moment.

Constraining the problem correctly was important for producing results that I could rely on. This meant constraining the steel hinge that lets the wall rotate, placing boundary conditions for the bottom surface of the wall, and assuming bolted connections where I had concrete bolts sunken into the base. When I created a mesh, I refined the grid in areas where I knew there were concentrated stresses and ran increasingly finer meshes to converge on a more realistic value.