Robustness Assessment of Steel Moment Resisting Frames

Nowadays, many buildings with steel Moment Resisting Frames (MRF) are built in seismic zones when seismic codes are at its early stages of development, and as such, these structures are often designed solely to resist lateral wind loads without providing an overall ductile mechanism. On the other hand, current seismic design criteria based on hierarchy of resistance allow enhancing the structural ductility and controlling the structural plastic behaviour. Therefore, seismic design criteria might also be beneficial to improve the structural robustness. In order to investigate this issue for steel MRF, a parametric study based on pushdown analysis and on the Energy Balance Method is described and discussed in the present paper. With this regard, the following cases are examined: (i) MRF not designed for seismic actions and (ii) MRF designed for seismic actions. The investigated parameters are (i) the number of storeys, (ii) the interstorey height, (iii) the span length, (iv) the building plan layout and (v) the column loss scenario. Results show that the low-rise and long span structures are the most prone to progressive collapse and that the elements in the directly affected zone of the wind designed 8 storey structures respond in the elastic range. Structures designed according to the capacity design principles were found to be less robust than wind designed structures that are characterized by strong beams and weak columns. The number of elements above the removed column and size of beam cross section were found to be key parameters in arresting progressive collapse.

Study on Progressive Collapse Behavior of SRC Column-Steel Beam Hybrid Frame Based on Pushdown Analysis

To investigate the progressive collapse behavior of Steel Reinforced Concrete (SRC) column-steel beam hybrid frame after the failure of key structural elements, a PQ-Fiber model for an 8-storey structure is established in ABAQUS program. Nonlinear dynamic and static pushdown analysis are carried out after the failure and removal of the bottom-middle and bottom-corner columns. Numerical results of both methods agree well with each other. Results show that SRC column-steel frame has good resistance to progressive collapse under dynamic instantaneous load. After sudden removal of a bottom middle column, the development of structural collapse exhibits two mechanisms, the beam mechanism and the catenary mechanism. When the structure is within small deformation range, the collapse resistance of the residual frame is provided by the beam bending moment capacity, which is beam mechanism. For large deformation situation, the collapse resistance is mainly provided by the beam tensile strength, which is catenary mechanism. However, with the removal of a bottom corner column, the residual structure only undergoes the beam mechanism even for large deformations. For future practical applications, the influence of the steel ratio, steel section size, and the vertical position of the removed key components are investigated through a detailed parametric study.

Assessment of Progressive Collapse Capacity of Earthquake-Resistant Steel Moment Frames Using Pushdown Analysis

The study investigates the progressive collapse resisting capacity of earthquake-resistant steel moment-resisting frames subjected to column failure. The aim is to investigate whether these structures are able to resist progressive collapse after column removal, that may represent a situation where an extreme event may cause a critical column to suddenly lose its load bearing capacity. Since the response to this abnormal loading condition is most likely to be dynamic and nonlinear, both nonlinear static and nonlinear dynamic analyses are carried out. The vertical pushover analysis (also called pushdown) is applied with two different procedures. The first one is the traditional procedure generally accepted in current guidelines that increases the load incrementally to a specified level after column has been removed. The second procedure tries to reproduce the timing of progressive collapse and, for this reason, gravity loads are applied to the undamaged structure before column removal. The load-displacement relationships obtained from pushdown analyses are compared with the results of incremental nonlinear dynamic analyses. The effect of various design variables, such as number of stories, number of bays, level of seismic design load, is investigated. The results are eventually used to evaluate the dynamic amplification factor to be applied in pushdown analysis for a more accurate estimation of the collapse resistance.

Pushdown flow analysis with abstract garbage collection

In the static analysis of functional programs, pushdown flow analysis and abstract garbage collection push the boundaries of what we can learn about programs statically. This work illuminates and poses solutions to theoretical and practical challenges that stand in the way of combining the power of these techniques. Pushdown flow analysis grants unbounded yet computable polyvariance to the analysis of return-flow in higher-order programs. Abstract garbage collection grants unbounded polyvariance to abstract addresses which become unreachable between invocations of the abstract contexts in which they were created. Pushdown analysis solves the problem of precisely analyzing recursion in higher-order languages; abstract garbage collection is essential in solving the “stickiness” problem. Alone, our benchmarks demonstrate that each method can reduce analysis times and boost precision by orders of magnitude. We combine these methods. The challenge in marrying these techniques is not subtle: computing the reachable control states of a pushdown system relies on limiting access during transition to the top of the stack; abstract garbage collection, on the other hand, needs full access to the entire stack to compute a root set, just as concrete collection does.Conditionalpushdown systems were developed for just such a conundrum, but existing methods are ill-suited for the dynamic nature of garbage collection. We show fully precise and approximate solutions to the feasible paths problem for pushdown garbage-collecting control-flow analysis. Experiments reveal synergistic interplay between garbage collection and pushdown techniques, and the fusion demonstrates “better-than-both-worlds” precision.