• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.1025-1037
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• 2015

Flexible base isolation bearings that separate superstructure from ground have been widely used in the construction field because they make a significant contribution to increasing the fundamental period of the structure, thereby decreasing response acceleration transmitted into the superstructure. However, the established bearing devices installed to uphold the whole building give rise to some problems involved with failure and collapse due to lack of the capacity as modern structures are getting more massive and higher. Therefore, this study suggests new isolation bearings assembled with additional restrainers enabled to reinforcing and recentering, and then evaluates their performance to withstand the seismic load. The superelastic shape memory alloy (SMA) bars are installed into the conventional lead-rubber bearing (LRB) devices in order to provide recentering forces. These new systems are modeled as component spring models for the purpose of conducting nonlinear dynamic analyses with near fault ground motion data. The LRB devices with steel bars are also designed and analyzed to compare their responses with those of new systems. After numerical analyses, ultimate strength, maximum displacement, permanent deformation, and recentering ratio are compared to each model with an aim to investigate which base isolation models are superior. It can be shown that LRB models with superelastic SMA bars are superior to other models compared to each other in terms of seismic resistance and recentering effect.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.9-19
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• 2002

Steel piers and concrete-filled steel(CFS) piers, in spite of reasonable strength, high ductility, small section, and fast construction, have not been considered as one of alternatives to RC piers even in the highly populated urban area where aseismic safety, limited space and fast construction are indispensably required. This paper, the first of two companion papers for the seismic performance of steel and CFS piers, tests steel and CFS piers under quasi-static cyclic loading to estimate their ductility and strength. Additional details such as rebars and base ribs are added to increase the ductility of a concrete-filled steel pier with minimum additional cost. Also, simplified numerical analyses using nonlinear spring and shell elements are examined for the estimation of the ductility and strength of concrete-filled steel piers and a steel pier. The result shows that concrete-filled steel peirs have higher energy absorption, i.e., ductility and strength than those of steel pier and increasing bonding between in-filled concrete and lower diaphragm, and the improved details of stress concentrated region would be important for the ductility and strength of a pier. Numerical results show that simplified modeling with nonlinear springs and shells has potential to be effective modeling technique to estimate the seismic performance of a concrete-filled steel pier.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.261-271
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• 2016

In the prediction of response of a pile in soil, numerical approaches such as a finite element method are generally applied due to complicate nonlinear behaviors of soils. However, the numerical methods based on the finite elements require heavy efforts in pile and soil modelling and also take long computing time. So their usage is limited especially in the early design stage in which principal dimensions and properties are not specified and tend to vary. On the contrary, theoretical approaches adopting linear approximations for soils are relatively simple and easy to model and take short computing time. Therefore, if they are validated to be reliable, they would be applicable in predicting responses of a pile in soil, particularly in early design stage. In case of wind turbines regarded in this study, it is required to assess their natural frequencies in early stages, and in this simulation the supporting pile inserted in soil could be replaced with a simplified elastic boundary condition at the bottom end of the wind turbine tower. To do this, analysis for a pile in soil is performed in this study to extract the spring constants at the top end of the pile. The pile in soil can be modelled as a beam on elastic spring by assuming that the soils deform within an elastic range. In this study, it is attempted to predict pile deformations and influence factors for lateral loads by means of the beam-on-spring model. As two example supporting structures for wind turbines, mono pile and suction pile models with different diameters are examined by evaluating their influence factors and validated by comparing them with those reported in literature. In addition, the deflection profiles along the depth and spring constants at the top end of the piles are compared to assess their supporting features.