Simplified Procedure for Progressive Collapse Analysis of Steel Structures

Progressive collapse refers to a phenomenon in which a local damage of a primary structural element leads to the failure of partial or whole structural system. To investigate the progressive collapse of structures, nonlinear dynamic procedure leads to more accurate results than static procedures. Nonlinear dynamic procedure is very complicated and the evaluation or validation of its results may be very time-consuming. Therefore using simplified methods are very important. This paper presents a simplified and accurate analysis procedure for progressive collapse analysis of steel structures. The results of the proposed method showed to have good agreement with nonlinear dynamic analysis results. Also, the capacity curve obtained from dividing the accumulated area under the nonlinear static load-displacement curve by the corresponding displacement of the column-removed point is used to predict the progressive collapse resistance of the column-removed structure.