Pushdown resistance as a measure of robustness in progressive collapse analysis

This paper presents a technique termed ‘pushdown analysis’ that can be used to investigate the robustness of building systems by computing residual capacity and establishing collapse modes of a damaged structure. The proposed method is inspired by the pushover method commonly used in earthquake engineering. Three variants of the technique, termed uniform pushdown, bay pushdown and incremental dynamic pushdown, are suggested and exercised using nonlinear analysis on 10-story steel moment frames designed for moderate and high levels of seismic risk. Simulation results show that the frame designed for high seismic risk is more robust than the corresponding one designed for moderate seismic risk. The improved performance is attributed to the influence of seismic detailing, specifically, the presence of reduced beam sections and stronger columns. It is shown that the dynamic impact factors associated with column removal are significantly lower than the commonly used value of 2.0 and are in line with lower values in the guidelines recently proposed by the US Department of Defense. The study suggests that seismic ‘fuses’ can play a role in the design for robustness and a discussion of the implications of this observation is provided.