A fast construction sequential analysis strategy for tall buildings

In structural analysis of tall buildings the traditional primary loading analysis approach that assumes all the loads are simultaneously applied to the fully built structure has been shown to be unsuitable by many researches. The construction sequential analysis that reflects the fact of the level-by-level construction of tall buildings can provide more reliable results and has been used more and more. However, too much computational cost has prevented the construction sequential analysis from its application in CAD/CAE software for building structures, since such an approach needs to deal with systematic changing of resultant stiffness matrices following level-by-level construction. This paper firstly analyzes the characteristics of assembling and triangular factorization of the stiffness matrix in the finite element model of the construction sequential analysis, then presents a fast construction sequential analysis strategy and a corresponding step-by-step active column solver by means of improving the existing skyline solver. The new strategy avoids considerably repeated calculation by only working on the latest appended and modified part of resultant stiffness matrices in each construction level. Without any simplification, the strategy guarantees accuracy while efficiency is greatly enhanced. The numerical tests show that the proposed strategy can be implemented with high efficiency in practical engineering design.