Collapse behaviors of plane lattice arches under excessive dynamic and static vertical loads

Abstract

The public buildings such as gymnasiums which are realized with spatial structures have been often used for regional temporary shelters when the disaster of huge earthquakes or typhoons has occurred. Therefore, the safety of spatial structures may be important for the disaster prevention plan. Then in this paper as for simple lattice structures, dynamic collapse behavior and static collapse behavior are numerically estimated in order to investigate what physical quantity is the definite factor that determines the load level of dynamic collapse, that is, the correlation of the two collapse phenomena. It has been pointed out that a physical quantity is the strain energy of structures [1, 5]. In the dynamic simulations, the collapse is recognized by a sudden increase of the monitored nodal displacements and the maximum input acceleration values of earthquakes are gradually increased while monitoring the maximum displacements. As the results, an estimation method is presented to predict the collapse level of vertical seismic motions with the information of static collapse behavior of structures.