Narrow Results

A program which can be used to simulate the elastic response of lumped mass single-degree-of-freedom systems to impact actions is introduced in this paper. The underlying governing equations and the implementation of their solutions on a spreadsheet are described. As illustrated in the paper, the program can be extended to obtaining approximate solutions for the inelastic response of a reinforced column to the impact by a vehicle. Solutions obtained from the developed spreadsheet have been compared with those obtained by other means. Few engineers have the skills of undertaking their own sanity checks on analyses involving transient actions including that of the impact of an object. Codes of practices often resort to the use of equivalent static loading for representing transient actions and this may give misleading results. Portable and inexpensive computational tools like the ones presented herein enable engineers to conveniently undertake their own sanity checks on computer output from dynamic analyses.