NLFEA Damage Assessment of RC Framed Buildings Subjected to Column Settlements

The prevention of progressive collapse in buildings caused by different actions, usually not considered in normal design, has attracted increasing interest in recent years. In Reinforced Concrete (RC) frames, a frequent cause of progressive collapse is represented by large settlements of one or more columns, caused e.g., by design or construction errors, underground works, or foundation failure. The focus of this work is to identify significant structural response parameters, which can be used both to assess the reliability level of existing structures subjected to large differential settlements, and to proper design Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems able to detect in real-time the triggering of possible structural issues. To this end, nonlinear finite element analyses are carried out, by considering different settlement scenarios. The applied procedure is first validated against experimental results from the literature, and then applied to the damage assessment of an existing Italian school building.