Exciting news! We're transitioning to the Statewide California Earthquake Center. Our new website is under construction, but we'll continue using this website for SCEC business in the meantime. We're also archiving the Southern Center site to preserve its rich history. A new and improved platform is coming soon!

A Benchmark Problem for Collapse Prediction of Steel Structures

Swaminathan Krishnan

Submitted 2010, SCEC Contribution #1395

To aid in the evaluation of the collapse-prediction capability of competing methodologies, a benchmark problem of a water-tank subjected to the Takatori near-source record from the 1995 Kobe earthquake, scaled down by a factor of 0.32, is proposed. The water-tank, supported by a 5-segment steel lattice tower, is so configured as to have a collapse mechanism that is always triggered due to catastrophic column and brace buckling at the bottom-most segment under all forms of ground motion. A FRAME3D model of the tank reveals severe buckling in the bottom mega-columns on the west face of the tower, followed almost instantaneously by compression brace buckling on the north and south faces, when the structure is hit by the Takatori near-source pulse, resulting in a tilt in the structure. Subsequent shaking induces P-Delta instability resulting in complete collapse of the tank.

Citation
Krishnan, S. (2010). A Benchmark Problem for Collapse Prediction of Steel Structures. Journal of Structural Engineering, (submitted).