NEESR-II RESEARCH PROJECT:

SIDESWAY COLLAPSE OF DETERIORATING STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS

An Overview…

The opportunity to conduct testing of civil engineering systems was substantially expanded recently by the establishment of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), funded by the National Science Foundation.  Structured to serve as a national co-laboratory with nodes distributed at 15 locations, NEES enables multidisciplinary researchers to combine their expertise and investigate multi-faceted problems and systems with depth and scale not possible before.

In order to make informed decisions on life safety protection, we have to develop the capability to predict the collapse potential of buildings.  As one of the individual investigator projects in the first phase of NEES research (NEESR) funded by the National Science Foundation, the primary objective of our study is to develop a consistent approach to the prediction of collapse of structural systems and for incorporation of collapse safety concepts in the design process.  The approach will be based on a combination of analytical and experimental simulations, with the main aspect of the latter being a shaking table collapse test of a model of a steel frame structure, being carried out at the NEES facility at the University at Buffalo.