Incremental dynamic analysis of seismic collapse of super-tall building structures

In the present work, the incremental dynamic analysis is performed for the super-tall building structure of ZhongNan Center, which is more than 700 m high and is currently under construction in Suzhou, China. The Chi-Chi earthquake record is used as the ground motion input. The peak ground accelerations are scaled to five levels including 0.2 g, 0.4 g, 0.8 g, 1.4 g, and 2.0 g. The plastic damage model is adopted to represent the material failure. The finite element model is developed by using fiber beam elements for beam-columns and laminated shell elements for shear walls and slabs. Under the attack of strong seismic ground motions, the super tall structure experiences overall collapse, which is well captured by the developed finite element model. More importantly, the collapse patterns of the super tall structure are rather different under the excitations of earthquake records with same wave pattern but different peak accelerations.