Civil Engineering Association

Investigation on a mitigation scheme to resist the progressive collapse of reinforced concrete buildings

This study presents the investigation of the approach which was presented by Thaer M. Saeed Alrudaini
to provide the alternate load path to redistribute residual loads and preventing from the potential progressive collapse of
RC buildings. It was proposed to transfer the residual loads upwards above the failed column of RC buildings by vertical
cables hanged at the top to a hat steel braced frame seated on top of the building which in turn redistributes the residual
loads to the adjacent columns. In this study a ten-storey regular structural building has been considered to investigate
progressive collapse potential. Structural design is based on ACI 318-08 concrete building code for special RC frames and
the nonlinear dynamic analysis is carried out using SAP2000 software, following UFC4-023-03 document. Nine
independent failure scenarios are adopted in the investigation, including six external removal cases in different floors and
three removal cases in the first floor. A new detail is proposed by using barrel and wedge to improve residual forces
transfer to the cables after removal of the columns. Simulation results show that progressive collapse of building that
resulted from potential failure of columns located in floors can be efficiently resisted by using this method