Seismic Analysis and Damage Evaluation of RC Frame Structures Based on BIM Platform

Abstract

In order to overcome the shortcomings in integrating the building information modeling (BIM) and seismic finite element technique for building structures, a new seismic analysis and damage evaluation method for reinforced concrete (RC) frame structures was proposed by integrating Revit and OpenSees, in which the information about geometric and material of the existing BIM model in Revit was extracted as part of the finite element analysis model of OpenSees; supplementary settings about the element type, material constitutive model, load information, and analysis type for finite element analysis were made according to the input format of OpenSees, and OpenSees program was directly called for numerical analysis in the Revit software which realized seismic analysis and damage evaluation of RC frame structures based on BIM. RTO, a revolutionary structural seismic analysis and damage evaluation tool based on the three-tier architecture theory, was created by combining Revit and OpenSees via the RevitAPI interface. The preprocessing module was created to contact OpenSees for finite element analysis, the postprocessing module was created to secondary analyze, display, and export the analysis data, and crucial structural seismic damage information was automatically saved in the Revit model. A calculation example of a five-story RC frame structure was provided to demonstrate the operation process of the proposed method and the developed program. The example proved the feasibility of integrating the BIM and finite element method in elastic-plastic structural seismic analysis. The proposed approach would facilitate the participation of structural seismic analysis in BIM life cycle collaboration.