Modelling Progressive Collapse of Timber Buildings and Its Applications

Publication

Dec 1

Buildings are designed to provide safety, shelter, and functional spaces for people. To ensure this, building guidelines specify minimum safety requirements. These guidelines usually work well, which is why building collapses are rare.

However, buildings can still fail if unexpected events occur, such as human mistakes (e.g., construction errors) or deliberate attacks. Current design standards mostly focus on expected situations, like normal usage or weather-related loads, but they don’t fully address these abnormal scenarios. With such events becoming more frequent, the risk of building collapses—and the resulting loss of life and property—is increasing.

To deal with unexpected damage, buildings need to be "robust," meaning they can handle small issues without leading to major failures. For example, if a part of a building is damaged, it shouldn’t cause the entire structure to collapse. However, the rules for robustness were created for materials like concrete and steel. These don’t work well for modern timber (wood) buildings, which behave differently when damaged.

Because timber buildings are becoming more popular, there’s an urgent need to study how they respond to damage and update design guidelines. This is especially important because timber buildings are more at risk of a "progressive collapse," where a small failure spreads through the building in a chain reaction.

To address this, researchers developed a new model to study how timber buildings might collapse and how to make them safer. This model combines computer simulations, mathematical formulas, and test results to predict how timber buildings behave under different damage scenarios. It can even calculate the risk of losing lives compared to material damage. For example, tests on a multi-story timber building in Switzerland showed that the loss of life far outweighed the cost of material damage, highlighting the importance of focusing on safety.

Read the full publication here:

“Modelling Progressive Collapse of Timber Buildings and Its Applications ”

Dr. Alex Cao graduated in 2024 as part of MainWood in the group of Prof. Dr. Andrea Frangi, associated to focus group WP-C2 Laminated beams for taller and robuster buildings.