doi:10.3850/978-981-08-6218-3_key-8
Resisting Progressive Collapse by the use of Tying Resistance
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Professor David Nethercot Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Imperial College London United Kingdom. d.nethercot@imperial.ac.uk |
Biography
David Nethercot is the Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. Previously, he was on the staff at Cardiff, Sheffield and Nottingham Universities, including five years as head of department at Nottingham.
Ten of his papers have won institution prizes. He was awarded a DSc degree in 1993 and elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering in that same year. He is a past president of the Institution of Structural Engineers and a former council member of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2006 he was awarded an OBE for services to Structural Engineering, in 2008 the Charles Massonet Prize from ECCS and in 2009 the IStructE Gold Medal.
For 10 years he was chairman of the BSI Committee responsible for the design aspects of BS5950 as well as for UK input into the preparation of EC3.
David’s research has included work in the areas of buckling, connections, semi continuous construction, stainless steel and composite frames. He has supervised over 40 PhD students to completion, been responsible for a similar number of externally funded projects and spoken, often as a keynote speaker, in more than 50 countries.
Abstract
The simplest and most popular design approach for addressing progressive collapse in steel and composite frame structures is through the provision of “adequate” tying resistance in the beam to column connections. Using the Imperial College London assessment framework, which includes all important physical features of progressive collapse, its suitability as a measure of resistance to progressive collapse is examined herein. Several examples of column removal as a means of assessing the resistance of a floor grillage to progressive collapse are used in an attempt to correlate this properly with tying capacity. Because of the complex interplay of strength, stiffness and ductility of key components — especially those forming the connections — no real link between increased tying capacity and improved resistance to progressive collapse has been identified. It is, therefore, concluded that tying capacity alone cannot provide a reliable indication of ability to resist progressive collapse.
