Low velocity vehicle impact against building structures: An outline of relevant codes

Abstract

The new building codes tend to include vehicle impacts as part of the accidental actions to be considered. Most of these codes use equivalent static load to represent the effects of the impact against the structure. In this paper a bibliographical review of the indications is performed as provided by some of the most representative buildings codes in the world relating to impacts caused by vehicles. In particular we will focus on impacts caused by horizontal actions on structures, like car crashes against parking columns. We will show that the indications provided by the different standards studied are widely different each other and that there is not a clearly agreed procedure allowing the assessment of the effects of a vehicle impact through an equivalent static load. Keywords

Real size experiments of a car crash against a building column

“…Therefore, the dispersion between the codes is noticeable. A deeper analysis of the related codes and its dispersion can be found in [7].…”