Safety of concrete high-rise buildings during construction
Abstract
Current structural design specifications are intended to ensure safe and reliable performance of buildings during their service life. However, corresponding provisions are absent for buildings during their construction period. According to recent studies, a large number of building failures occur during the construction period. In addition, it has generally been assumed that the effect of the construction process on the performance of buildings during their service life can be ignored. In the research presented herein, the safety of concrete high-rise buildings during construction is investigated. A deflection-based method for analyzing multistory reinforced concrete buildings during construction is developed. The analysis is based on updating the deflected geometry of the concrete building with successive construction steps. The analysis takes into account the effect of construction cycle length, development of concrete strength and creep in concrete and formwork. The safety of the building is examined by performing a reliability analysis to compute the system reliability considering both uncorrelated and correlated modes of failure. This type of analysis is used to investigate the reliability of the building with different construction parameters. A Level-2 safety-checking equation is developed for concrete buildings during construction. This proposed equation is used to investigate the conditions under which the construction checking criterion governs the design. Human errors are believed to be the major cause of building failures. These errors may occur during any activity of the building process including planning, design, construction, utilization and demolition. In the present work, a probabilistic approach to investigating the effect of human errors in both load and resistance on the global reliability index is developed. Different scenarios for errors during construction are considered and their consequences on the reliability of the building are investigated. Finally, a methodology to reduce the frequency of human errors based on improving human behavior in an organization is presented.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Rosowsky, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Civil engineering
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