Quantitative investigation on collapse margin of steel high-rise buildings subjected to extremely severe earthquakes

Abstract

Reponses of structures subjected to severe earthquakes sometimes significantly surpass what was considered in the design. It is important to investigate the failure mechanism and collapse margin of structures beyond design, especially for high-rise buildings. In this study, steel high-rise buildings using either square concrete-filled-tube (CFT) columns or steel tube columns are designed. A detailed three-dimensional (3D) structural model is developed to analyze the seismic behavior of a steel high-rise towards a complete collapse. The effectiveness is verified by both component tests and a full-scale shaking table test. The collapse margin, which is defined as the ratio of PGA between the collapse level to the design major earthquake level (Level 2), is quantified by a series of numerical simulations using incremental dynamic analyses (IDA). The baseline building using CFT columns collapsed with a weak first story mechanism and presented a collapse margin ranging from 10 to 20. The significant variation in the collapse margin was caused by the different characteristics of the input ground motions. The building using equivalent steel columns collapsed earlier due to the significant shortening of the locally buckled columns, exhibiting only 57% of the collapse margin of the baseline building. The influence of reducing the height of the first story was quite significant. The shortened first story not only enlarged the collapse margin by 20%, but also changed the collapse mode.