High Fidelity Modeling of Building Collapse with Realistic Visualization of Resulting Damage and Debris

The proposed Phase II effort investigates innovative finite element formulations, alternative structural modeling procedures and modern parallel computational strategies to improve the computational performance of high fidelity simulation software for modeling the progressive collapse behavior of blast damaged buildings. Its goal is to reduce the time required to compute and visualize high fidelity solutions for this class of problems to a few days instead of many months. At least two orders of magnitude increase in speed will be achieved while maintaining good fidelity of results. The effort focuses on reinforced concrete and steel frame buildings which cover more than 70% of large office building construction. Additionally, this effort implements a simple Graphical Interface for (a) generating complex high fidelity models of above ground civil buildings, (b) identifying structural members damaged by blast, (c) automatically computing the resulting progressive collapse and (d) visualizing the final state of the building at the end of the collapse process including the ending position of any building debris formed during the collapse process.