Mechanism of Collapse of Tall Steel Moment-Frame Buildings under Earthquake Excitation
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 11
Abstract
The mechanism of collapse of tall steel moment-frame buildings is explored through three-dimensional nonlinear analyses of two 18-story steel moment-frame buildings under earthquake excitation. Both fracture-susceptible and perfect-connection conditions are investigated. Classical energy-balance analysis shows that only long-period excitation imparts energy to tall buildings large enough to cause collapse. Under such long-period motion, the shear-beam analogy alludes to the existence of a characteristic mechanism of collapse or a few preferred mechanisms of collapse for these buildings. Numerical evidence from parametric analyses of the buildings under a suite of idealized sawtooth-like ground-motion time histories, with varying period (), amplitude (peak ground velocity, PGV), and duration (number of cycles, ), is presented to support this hypothesis. Damage localizes to form a quasi-shear band over a few stories. When the band is destabilized, sidesway collapse is initiated, and gravity takes over. Only one to five collapse mechanisms occur out of a possible 153 mechanisms in either principal direction of the buildings considered. Where two or more preferred mechanisms do exist, they have significant story-overlap, typically separated by just 1 story. It is shown that a simple work-energy relation applied to all possible quasi-shear bands combined with plastic analysis principles can systematically identify all the preferred collapse mechanisms.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express their deep gratitude to Professor Paul Jennings of the California Institute of Technology and three anonymous reviewers for their thorough review of this work. Their insightful comments have helped refine this article appreciably. This study was funded in part by the U.S. National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP; Grant No. G09AP00063). Financial support from NEHRP is gratefully acknowledged. The first author is also grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for their continued support of his research program. Recent grants include NSF Grant No. CMMI-0926962 and unnumbered grants from the USGS and SCEC.
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Information
Published In
Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 11 • November 2012
Pages: 1361 - 1387
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 13, 2011
Accepted: Jan 30, 2012
Published online: Feb 1, 2012
Published in print: Nov 1, 2012
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