Effect of support settlement on ultimate bearing capacity of Zhoukoudian steel structure

In order to study the effect of non-uniform support settlement on global stability ultimate bearing capacity of lattice shell structure, combining with the project of first site protective building in Zhoukoudian Ruins, the finite element software ANSYS is employed to conduct geometric nonlinear and double nonlinear global stability analysis of the single-layer lattice shell respectively based on consistent mode imperfection method and advanced consistent mode imperfection method, thus the global stability ultimate bearing capacity under different settlement cases is obtained and compared. Analysis results show that non-uniform support settlement is beneficial to increase the elastic global stability ultimate bearing capacity of the structure by a small margin, but excessive settlement may have adverse effects on the bearing capacity of the structures with initial imperfections. When considering material nonlinearity, small non-uniform support settlement is conducive to a slight increase in the elastoplastic global stability ultimate bearing capacity of the structure that decreases and is lower than that without settlement with the increase of non-uniform settlement. In addition, non-uniform support settlement will not affect the instability path of the lattice shell.