Controlled Building Collapse Analysis and Validation

Demolition of buildings at the end of their life cycle has become more and more important. These buildings are either no longer attractive in an architectural sense or did not reach sufficient standards. Especially industrial buildings which are no longer used because of technological or business reasons are often demolished by controlled explosives. To avoid damage of neighboring buildings or traffic facilities an accurate prediction of the building collapse is needed. Otherwise uncontrolled collapse may cause a great physical and major collateral damage. In this contribution a global finite element model of a real world building is used to investigate the collapse sequence. A validation to prove the quality of the prediction has been carried out. The focus is laid on the influence of the failure criterion to the prognosis quality.