Structures must be robust so that they will be steadily kept to work under the influence of internal uncertainty factors and external environmental disturbance. At present, there is no accepted theory or measure of robustness. Vulnerability is the opposite of robustness, thus, a measure of vulnerability can help to gain an insight into the lack of robustness. This concept has been developed into a theory of structural vulnerability by Blockley. The purpose of this theory is to identify the weakness of the structure by analyzing the influence of different damages to the structural form. The structure is divided into different level structural clusters according to the connectivity of structural nodes and the structural hierarchical model is formed to find the weak elements of the structure. Thus, the weakness of the structure is identified. In this paper, the vulnerability theory is used to analyze the failure scenarios of single layer-latticed domes. A computer program has been written to perform vulnerability analysis and the accuracy of this analysis has been verified with an example that exists in the literature. Numerical analysis is carried out for the failure scenarios analysis of a 24-member space frame dome. It is shown that the failure scenarios of long-span single layer-latticed dome can be obtained by the structural vulnerability analysis. The failure scenario of the 24-member space frame dome subjected to earthquake motion is compared with the result of vulnerability analysis indicating an effective way to know the weakness of the structure based on the theory. The damage demand and the vulnerability index are two variables in the evaluation index of failure scenarios and they are the measures of the effort required to damage a member and the “disproportionateness” of the consequences to the damage respectively
Zhu Nanhai;Ye Jihong.
Failure Scenarios Analysis of Single-Layer Latticed Domes Based on Structural Vulnerability Theory[J]. Journal of Vibration and Shock, 2011, 30(6): 248-255
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