Catenary action of beam to column steel connections

Abstract

Collapse of a building is rarely happened unless unusual incident like terrorist attack or gas explosion occurs. Either partial or whole collapse of the structural system may take place and this is one of the great challenges for engineers to mitigate this collapse which is usually termed as progressive collapse. In addition, American Society of Civil Engineer defined the collapse as the spread of initial local failure from element to element, and eventually results in the collapse of either an entire structure or disproportionately large part of it.Alternate path method is one of the key ideas for preventing building to collapse progressively. By allowing local failure to occur, the structural system has to redistribute its gravity load such that new equilibrium configuration can be achieved. In this case, a sudden column removal scenario is set to study the behaviour of beam-to-column connections because joints play an important role in distributing the internal forces. Under this scenario, large vertical displacement is expected at the joint above the removed column and cable-like-mechanism (catenary action) is performed.