Seismosoft | Earthquake Engineering Solutions

Dear SeismoSoft and SeismoStruct users

I’m modelling a precast RC industrial building.
It is a simple one storey building, with cantilever columns, beams and prestressed roof element (wing/V-shaped beam).
In particular, I modelled the connection between roof elements and the supporting beam, therefore I used two links element to simulate the connection behaviour.
The two links elements are added between the same two adjacent joints so they are in “parallel”.

The first link element simulates the interlock behaviour, given by the mortar bed between the roof element and the supporting beam.
The second link simulates the fixing steel plates between the roof element and the supporting beam.

The interlock behaviour has a brittle failure, so when this brittle failure is reached during the non-linear time history analysis I would like to deactivate this link element and not allow to reload it again.

My questions are:
Is it possible to deactivate a link element when a certain force is reached?
Is it possible to do this by link performance criteria assigning it "no residual strength" when the ultimate capacity force is reached?
I tried with the latter option but it seems not to work because the strength remains active also after the criterion is reached.

Thank you in advance and best regards

Dear gmenichini,

It is possible to deactivate the element within the "Element Properties" module, in the Element Connectivity Tab, by setting the proper "Deactivation TIme/L.F.".

Dear Zoi Gronti
thank you for your kind reply.

I know that it is possible to deactivate an element by setting the deactivation time, however, in my model I have many links of the type described above so I can't know which of them reaches the failure first, therefore it is not easy to set a deactivation time for each link.
I thought that a performance criterion would be more appropriate for my purpose.

I would also like to ask if the Gap_elpl element works also for negative values of the gap or if it takes only positive values.

Best regards

Giovanni

Dear gmenichini,

It is not possible to apply negative values in the Gap_elpl response curve.

Dear gmenichini,

Regarding your question, if you are able to use the "no residual strength" option in the performance criteria, yes you are able to do so. After the performance criterion is reached, the strength of the link element will be set equal to zero. Please check if you have assigned the proper values with the proper sign in your performance criteria.