Assessment of Structural Robustness under Different Events according to Vulnerability
Publication: Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 30, Issue 5
Abstract
Structural robustness is investigated in this study according to its opposite property, i.e., structural vulnerability, which is calculated as the assembly of component vulnerability measured by the vulnerability coefficient. Different types of vulnerability coefficients are suitable for both truss and RC frame structures. An importance coefficient based on the bearing capacity of the remaining structure is proposed to reveal the internal topology and failure scenarios, and is viewed as the weight coefficient of the corresponding vulnerability coefficient. The occurrence probability density function is introduced to describe the uncertainty of abnormal events and assess structural robustness under different events. Numerical examples of several idealized trusses and a RC frame are performed to demonstrate the use of the proposed robustness index. Analysis results show that the robustness index provided good explanation for robustness quantification for both truss and RC frame structures under different events. Moreover, two methods, i.e., increasing the local resistance and redundancy of the structure, to upgrade structural robustness also testify to the effectiveness and accuracy of the robustness index.
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Acknowledgments
The work described in this paper has been funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51078132). The authors also acknowledge Zhongyuan Xu for his assistance in graph software and Libo Yan for his valuable comments on this paper.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 30 • Issue 5 • October 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 1, 2014
Accepted: Oct 23, 2015
Published online: Jan 7, 2016
Discussion open until: Jun 7, 2016
Published in print: Oct 1, 2016
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