Progressive failure of buildings under landslide impact

Abstract

Buildings are the most concerned element in landslide risk assessment. A weak link in landslide risk analysis is the evaluation of building response and vulnerability when impacted by a landslide. In this paper, failure mechanisms and processes of typical reinforced concrete buildings upon landslide impacts are discovered through an explicit time integration analysis in LS-DYNA. The Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation, which allows automatic rezoning, is applied to simulate the landslide flow dynamics and the impact into the building. Three landslide intensity levels are considered. Progressive collapse of the building is observed in the high-impact intensity case. The frontal walls are firstly destroyed due to its low out-of-plane flexural capacity, followed by the progressive failure of columns at the ground floor. The collapse of building occurs when the remaining load-bearing components cannot resist the superstructure loadings. Two plastic hinge failure mechanisms are observed on the damaged columns when the ultimate bending moments of the columns are exceeded at both ends. Finally, a five-class classification system is proposed to evaluate building damage states based on field observations and the numerical simulation results. The analysis helps robust building design and assessment of building vulnerability to landslides.