Comparison Of Building Collapse Simulation Results From Finite Element And Rigid Body Models

In case of planning a building demolition, the information about geometry, quality of building materials, the design of the load carrying system and documentation of the structural calculation is often incomplete and imprecise. Thus for the analysis of a collapse event, engineers are forced to consider the uncertainty of primary parameters influencing e. g. the resistance of structural elements of a building. This kind of uncertainty can be described using suitable data models such as fuzziness and fuzzy randomness [6]. Within such an ‘uncertain’ structural analysis the deterministic fundamental solution is applied repeatedly. A comprehensive overview over algorithms of fuzzy analysis and fuzzy stochastic analysis is given in [5]. First applications of uncertainty collapse analyses can be found in [7, 8]. However, considering several uncertain parameters in an analysis the problem dimension and the necessary effort can be quite high. To receive a good prediction for a complex building collapse, several hundred or even more deterministic solutions are needed. This requires an efficient and fast scheme to perform the analysis for highly nonlinear problems, concerning geometry, material and changing boundary conditions such as contact.