Assessment of Building Damage Induced by Three-Dimensional Ground Movements

Damage in buildings caused by excavation-induced ground displacement is a major concern in any underground work of an urban area. To predict the building damage, it is generally assumed the onset of visible cracking is associated with the limiting or critical tensile strain of the structure. The present analytical models of calculating tensile strains analyze individual walls of the building as elastic deep beams. Because of the two-dimensional nature of these methods, the walls are assumed to be perpendicular to the excavation axis. To obtain the maximum tensile strain, only in-plane movements are considered, whereas the effects of three-dimensional displacements such as twist are ignored. In this study, the building is represented as a simply supported rectangular elastic thick plate. The relationship between the state of tensile strain and the onset of visible cracking is applied to the plate theory. The building damage criteria based on critical displacement parameters, namely deflection ratio, horizontal strain, and twist, are proposed. A number of case studies of damaged buildings are used to assess the ability of this procedure to predict the degree of damage. The new plate model obtained the most number of accurate predictions compared with the other beam models.