Construction and Steel Structure

Earthquakes are often followed by fires, which compound the damage inflicted by ground shaking and subject the affected population to further increased risk to lives and livelihoods. Insights would be obtained into the safety of the building stock subject to combined earthquakes and fire scenarios if models existed exhibit the versatility of sequential analysis of main earthquake-fire-aftershock ground motion. Such a system is described in this presentation. The advanced inelastic dynamic analysis platform ZEUS-NL is extended to conduct thermal stress analysis after large deformations and damage have been suffered by the structure. The deformed shape at the end of the earthquake is used as the initial condition for subjecting the structure to non-uniform temperature gradients that are varying with time. This second analysis may also be followed by another dynamic analysis under the effect of earthquake aftershocks. Examples of application are provided from previous earthquakes as well as experimental investigation. The tool presented is an open-source advanced analysis code that is available

for use worldwide.