Abstract
Robustness and vulnerability are important evaluation criteria for structural safety to improve progressive collapse resistance. Modeling rapid evaluation on important elements in the conceptual analysis stage is an essential and efficient way to ensure the robustness of a design. This paper proposes an evaluation method for element importance by using structural strain energy, which can reflect the influence of geometric topology and external load distribution on the structural safety status simultaneously. Three simple planar trusses are chosen to clarify the proposed method. Moreover, the influences of geometric topology, boundary condition, stiffness distribution and load distribution on the element importance are investigated. This evaluation method also extends to the two spatial truss structures, regular quadrangular pyramid grid structures and chessboard-shaped pyramid grid structures. The distribution characteristics of important elements are obtained. This work defines the element importance distribution law of typical structures. It provides a method for rapid robustness analysis of general truss structures, which can be effectively integrated into the existing analysis platform.
Highlights
The research on the progressive collapse resistance of structures has been a hot topic worldwide for many years due to the partial or total collapse of iconic and public buildings [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
In the conceptual design stage, a rapid and efficient evaluation of element importance is important for robustness analysis, especially for the long-span spatial grid structures characterized by a high degree of static indeterminacy [15]
Element importance can be evaluated by the tangent stiffness-based method [34], which was introduced to the safety assessment of spatial truss structures, including square pyramid grids, diagonal square pyramid grids, biorthogonal lattice grids and biorthogonal diagonal lattice grids
Summary
The research on the progressive collapse resistance of structures has been a hot topic worldwide for many years due to the partial or total collapse of iconic and public buildings [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. In the conceptual design stage, a rapid and efficient evaluation of element importance is important for robustness analysis, especially for the long-span spatial grid structures characterized by a high degree of static indeterminacy [15]. A safety assessment method based on a linear static analysis procedure was proposed to evaluate the sensitivity index and key index of structural members for steel truss roofs [28]. Element importance can be evaluated by the tangent stiffness-based method [34], which was introduced to the safety assessment of spatial truss structures, including square pyramid grids, diagonal square pyramid grids, biorthogonal lattice grids and biorthogonal diagonal lattice grids. A new method for evaluating element importance base on structural strain energy is proposed for rapid evaluation in the conceptual analysis stage, which is an important and efficient way for the robustness design. Two kinds of spatial trusses, regular quadrangular pyramid grid structures and chessboard-shaped pyramid grid structures, were chosen to test this method
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