Field Testing of Masonry Wall Structure Building for Assessment of Progressive Collapse

In this paper, progressive collapse performance of an existing multi-story building has been investigated through field experiments and computational simulations. The masonry load-bearing wall structure, Nosker House was located on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, Ohio. During the experiments, four exterior first-story load-bearing walls were consecutively removed from the building, which was demolished immediately after the experiment. Due to lack of full-scale building test data, the data produced in this research has been a valuable addition to the state of knowledge on progressive collapse assessment of masonry buildings. The main goal of field experiments was to simulate the structural dynamic and static response of buildings that may experience collapse after sudden loss of walls. Another objective was to investigate how the internal forces are redistributed within the building after each wall is removed. In this study, three-dimensional model of the building was developed and analyzed to simulate the building performance and collapse potential. Computational models and simulations were examined and compared to the experimental data from the field tests. This study showed robustness of existing buildings and contribution of different structural components to collapse resistance.