Study on collapse of steel-reinforced concrete structure caused by self-weight during construction

If a steel-reinforced concrete (SRC) structure has improper construction procedures, it may collapse due to unpredictable construction loads. This study aims to explore construction safety, taking the SRC structure collapse incident of a new factory under construction in Taiwan as an example. Through a second-order analysis, the findings of the study show that the cause of the collapse incident might be that, in the process of construction, the designers failed to consider the overall self-weight of the steel frame, which had exceeded the critical load of the structure at that time. This oversight may have led to a global buckling of the SRC structure. Consequently, the SRC structure collapsed immediately after being struck by a small disturbance. In addition, analysis results of a simplified composite column further reveal the differences between the SRC structure construction procedure and the SS structure construction procedure. When the steel beams and columns of an SRC structure are continuously uplifted and assembled without consideration of the construction progress of the lower-level RC beams and columns, the self-weight of the upper-level SRC steel frame might exceed the critical load of the SRC structure under construction, consequently leading to the collapse of the structure. Therefore, in order to prevent the SRC structure from collapsing during construction, proper designs and safe assembly procedures for SRC structures should be formulated to perfectly match the assembly procedure of the steel frame with that of the RC part.