Applications of Energy-Based Evaluation Method of Element Importance to Grid Structures

It is necessary to perform the robustness design for the progressive collapse resistance of grid structures. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive index to evaluate the member importance. An evaluation method on element importances is proposed based on the element strain energy and element removal technology. The element importance coefficients can be calculated based on the change of strain energy vectors after the removal of analyzed elements using ANSYS. The influence of the loading pattern, boundary condition, and geometric parameters of square pyramid grid structures are investigated. Moreover, the other three types of spatial grids are introduced to explore the difference in element importance distributions. The considerable difference in element importance coefficient distribution for different grid structures shows that it is essential to establish a general program for rapid model robustness analysis. This principle in this work can be easily integrated into the existing design and analysis platform to make up for this shortcoming.