Reliability study and simulation of the progressive collapse of Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport

• We analyze the reasons of the collapse of Terminal 2E of Roissy Airport.
• We perform a fine-grained model of the structure taking into account all the details of the geometrical and mechanical properties.
• We simulate the progressive collapse of the structure.
• We explain the reasons of the collapse.
• We perform a sensitivity analysis to show the relative importance of the variables affecting the structure.

Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport also known as Roissy Airport is the world's eighth-busiest airport in passengers served. In May 2004, the news of collapse of a portion of Terminal 2E leaving four casualties shook the world. Luckily, no boarding had been taking place in the collapsed area which consisted of a boarding area and three footbridges. This part of the terminal had an innovative design consisting of a vaulted concrete tube. We chose to model a representative part of the terminal to observe the structure's behavior. The purpose of our research is to explain the structure's collapse and to see if there were deficiencies from the design phase. Also, our new fine-grained model using Ansys Software makes it possible to explain the progressive collapse of the structure, which was the main challenge of our study. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis was performed in order to study the importance of each of the variables taken into account in the model.