Progressive Collapse Triggered by Column Loss: Detrimental Effect of Span Length and Beam Depth as Per GSA and DOD Guidelines

Failure of RC structure triggered by fracture is a much critical situation across various engineering disciplines. Progressive collapse, one of the most devastating type of building damage occurs when major structural load carrying member suddenly collapse due to accidental loads such as gas explosion, terrorist attack, fire, vehicle impact etc. Such accidents may occur at any floor and at any location. If neighboring members are not capable to resist and redistribute the additional load received, that part of the structure fails. This misbehavior of structure leads to costly damage, multiple injuries and possible loss of life. RC structure can resist progressive collapse through various mechanism such as Catenary action and Vierendeel action. The span length and beam depth required to satisfy the failure criteria for progressive collapse was obtained by using the virtual work method, as there is an equilibrium of the external work done by gravity load due to loss of column and the internal work done by plastic rotation of beam. The main focus of this paper is to assess the effect of location and span of RC building with an aspect ratio 1. In order to explain the behavior of structure elements, non-linear dynamic analysis was done using finite element software as per GSA and UFC-DoD guidelines. It was found that damage to corner column cause more torsional vibration compared to other cases.