An approach integrating BIM, octree and FEM-SBFEM for highly efficient modeling and seismic damage analysis of building structures

Abstract

This paper presents a novel BIM-Octree-FEM-SBFEM method (BOFSM) for rapid modeling and seismic damage analysis of structures. The BOFSM enables rapid and accurate modeling of structures by incorporating three innovative improvements. Firstly, integrating the digital building information method (BIM) with the Octree algorithm for discretization, a complex geometric model can be directly transformed into an analysis model. The automated transformation process eliminates considerable manual efforts typically expended in the traditional method. Secondly, the solver is improved using finite element method (FEM) to solve the hexahedrons elements while using scaled boundary FEM (SBFEM) to solve the polyhedrons. Thirdly, a nonlinear similar element (NSE) technique is proposed for cubes that occupy about 80% of the meshes. The matrices of one unit cubic element are pre-computed and stored in memory. Subsequently, the parameters of each element can be directly computed by scaling the dimensional coefficient and damage factor, thus offering an economical computational approach for massive matrices in damage analyses. The above methods are implemented in an in-house program GEODYNA, with CPU+GPU parallelization and multitasking capacity. Two refined seismic destruction analyses for frame buildings were conducted and some potential advantages are discussed. The results demonstrate the efficiency, universality and robustness of the BOFSM.