1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

Modelling of the collapse of engineering structures due to hazardous loading conditions such as intensive seismic excitation represents a great challenge for researchers. Apart from knowing the value of the collapse load, it is very important to know the behaviour of the structure up to collapse, especially with respect to crack initiation and plastification of particular zones, behaviour of the structure after reaching collapse load including collapse mechanism and residual load capacity after the end of earthquake. The collapse mechanism and the size of the area, where the structure damaged by the earthquake fails, are especially important when building is in densely populated urban areas. Although the devastating earthquakes which cause destruction are not uncommon, the greatest number of earthquakes still causes only minor structural damage. The decision whether to repair such a structure or leave it partially damaged to the action of the next earthquake is not easy either for the owners of such buildings or for engineers who should provide answers to such questions. This paper presents estimation of the seismic bearing capacity of several structures and their collapse mechanism using different non-linear numerical models depending on the material of the structure and its geometric complexity.