Design criteria for the folding implosion of high-rise RC buildings

Blasting is an efficient method for demolishing high-rise buildings and structures. If the collapse scope of a building to be blasted is insufficient controlled building implosion technology is preferred. However, for the conventional implosion, there is a lot of pre-weakening work that has to be done, and it is almost impossible to demolish the high-rise thin wall structures such as reinforced concrete (RC) chimneys. Therefore, a folding implosion method is proposed. In this method, several wedge-shaped notches should be blasted out in the high-rise building or structure, then these notches will turn to plastic hinges, meanwhile, the building or structure will turn to a folding kinematic chain, and the segments will overlap each other after falling down. For this method, some design criteria for the main parameters such as the position, initiation sequence, and initiation time delay of blast notches are proposed. The multi-body dynamics models for bi-folding implosion and tri-folding implosion are deduced to analyze the folding motions and rationality of the blasting plans. In two implosion cases, the design criteria and kinematics models are validated. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd