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Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 Time: 3:00-4:00 pm Place: 1-131

Seminar from Keremidis

Abstract: Traditional structural mechanics approaches evaluate damage of structural elements (ie beams, plates, walls) in relation to a design code limit load, while not accounting for the contribution of non-structural elements (ie sheathings, windows). While there exist more detailed frameworks accounting for all elements, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s HAZUS-MH and P58, they are only limited to specific building types and qualitative damage description (ie slight, moderate, extensive damage and so on). Moreover, these approaches describe damage of individual elements separately, rather than consider them as parts of a building ensemble, where they interact with each other. This motivates the development of an approach that can quantitatively address the complexity of buildings in both element scale and system scale. In this seminar, we present a new model where we consider a building as a collection of mass points (“atoms”) that interact via forces and moments, similarly to bonds in molecules. We validate the model upon experiments in dynamic beam buckling, where complex phenomena are reproduced accurately. Finally, we present a case study where we obtain fragility curves of a building under wind and earthquake hazard.