Progressive Collapse of a Chinese Ancient Building by Simulation

In order to protect Chinese ancient buildings, an ancient wooden building is taken as an example to study its progressive collapse under vertical transient loads. By LS-DYNA program simulation model of the ancient building is built. Then a structure member is considered inactive and failure loads in vertical direction are applied to the inactivation point to make the structure collapse. During the progressive collapse course displacements of the structure at different time are obtained. Then effects of inactivation strain of wood material are considered and response curves of the inactivation point under different inactivation strain values are obtained. Results show that under vertical loads the ancient building may collapse because of buckling caused by inactivation of one of its members, On the other hand its capability of progressive collapse resistance can be improved by increasing inactivation strain value of wood material.