• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제76권6호
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• pp.751-763
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• 2020

Available records of recent earthquakes show that near-field earthquakes have different characteristics than far-field earthquakes. In general, most of these unique characteristics of near-fault records can be attributed to their forward directivity. This phenomenon causes the records of ground motion normal to the fault to entail pulses with long periods in the velocity time history. The energy of the earthquake is almost accumulated in these pulses causing large displacements and, accordingly, severe damages in the building. Damage to structures caused by past earthquakes raises the need to assess the chance of future earthquake damage. There are a variety of methods to evaluate building seismic vulnerabilities with different computational cost and accuracy. In the meantime, fragility curves, which defines the possibility of structural damage as a function of ground motion characteristics and design parameters, are more common. These curves express the percentage of probability that the structural response will exceed the allowable performance limit at different seismic intensities. This study aims to obtain the fragility curve for low- and mid-rise structures of reinforced concrete moment frames by incremental dynamic analysis (IDA). These frames were exposed to an ensemble of 18 ground motions (nine records near-faults and nine records far-faults). Finally, after the analysis, their fragility curves are obtained using the limit states provided by HAZUS-MH 2.1. The result shows the near-fault earthquakes can drastically influence the fragility curves of the 6-story building while it has a minimal impact on those of the 3-story building.

• 터널과지하공간
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• 제32권2호
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• pp.144-159
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• 2022

본 연구에서는 지반의 열-수리-역학적 복합거동을 모델링하기 위한 순차적 접근법 기반의 시뮬레이터를 개발하고 적용된 연계해석 알고리즘의 계산성능을 분석하였다. 본 연구의 순차적 연계해석에서는 다공성 매질의 열 및 유체거동 분석을 위한 오픈소스 기반의 OpenGeoSys 수치코드와 역학해석을 위한 상용 소프트웨어 FLAC3D가 연동되었다. 해석해가 주어진 열-수리-역학적 복합거동 문제를 토대로 개발된 시뮬레이터에 대한 벤치마크 테스트가 수행되었다. 적용된 벤치마크 문제는 완전포화된 지반 내 점열원 작용 시 지반거동(시간에 따른 온도, 간극수압, 응력, 변형 변화)과 관계된다. 해석해와 수치해석 시뮬레이션 결과를 비교 분석하고 연계해석 시뮬레이터의 적정성을 조사하였다.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제53권5호
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• pp.1556-1568
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• 2021

The plate-type fuel assembly adopted in nuclear research reactor suffers from complicated effect induced by non-uniform irradiation, which might affect stress conditions, mechanical behaviors and thermal-hydraulic performance of the fuel assembly. This paper is the Part II work of a two-part study devoted to analyzing the complex unique mechanical deformation and thermal-hydraulic characteristics for the typical plate-type fuel assembly under irradiation effect, which is on the basis of developed and verified numerical thermal-fluid-structure coupling methodology under irradiation in Part I of this work. The mechanical deformation, thermal-hydraulic performance and Mises stress have been analyzed for the typical plate-type fuel assembly consisting of support plates under non-uniform irradiation. It was interesting to observe that: the plate-type fuel assembly including the fuel plates and support plates tended to bend towards the location with maximum fission rate; the hot spots in the fuel foil appeared at the location with maximum thickness increment; the maximum Mises stress of fuel foil was located at the adjacent location with the maximum plate thickness increment et al.

• Coupled systems mechanics
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.55-78
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• 2022

The main aim of this paper is the identification of the model parameters for the constitutive model of concrete and concrete-like materials capable of representing full set of 3D failure mechanisms under various stress states. Identification procedure is performed taking into account multi-scale character of concrete as a structural material. In that sense, macro-scale model is used as a model on which the identification procedure is based, while multi-scale model which assume strong coupling between coarse and fine scale is used for numerical simulation of experimental results. Since concrete possess a few clearly distinguished phases in process of deformation until failure, macro-scale model contains practically all important ingredients to include both bulk dissipation and surface dissipation. On the other side, multi-scale model consisted of an assembly micro-scale elements perfectly fitted into macro-scale elements domain describes localized failure through the implementation of embedded strong discontinuity. This corresponds to surface dissipation in macro-scale model which is described by practically the same approach. Identification procedure is divided into three completely separate stages to utilize the fact that all material parameters of macro-scale model have clear physical interpretation. In this way, computational cost is significantly reduced as solving three simpler identification steps in a batch form is much more efficient than the dealing with the full-scale problem. Since complexity of identification procedure primarily depends on the choice of either experimental or numerical setup, several numerical examples capable of representing both homogeneous and heterogeneous stress state are performed to illustrate performance of the proposed methodology.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제81권2호
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• pp.179-194
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• 2022

The bending, buckling and free vibration responses of functionally graded material (FGM) beams are investigated semi-analytically by the scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM) in this paper. In the concepts of the SBFEM, the dimension of computational domain can be reduced by one, therefore only the axial dimension of the beam is discretized using the higher order spectral element, which reduces the amount of calculation and greatly improves the calculation efficiency. The governing equation of FGM beams is derived in detail by the means of the principle of virtual work. Compared with the higher-order beam theory, fewer parameters and simpler control equations are used. And the governing equation is transformed into a first-order ordinary differential equation by introducing intermediate variables. Analytical solutions of the governing equation can be obtained by pade series expansion in the direction of thickness. Numerical example are compared with the numerical solutions provided by the previous researchers to verify the accuracy and applicability of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed formulations can quickly converge to the reference solutions by increasing the order of higher order spectral elements, and high accuracy can be achieved by using a small number of the elements. In addition, the influence of the structural sizes, material properties and boundary conditions on the mechanical behaviors of FG beams subjected to different load types is discussed.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제86권5호
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• pp.647-661
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• 2023

It is recognized that the installation of energy dissipation devices, such as the tuned mass damper (TMD), decreases the dynamic response of structures, however, the best parameters of each device persist hard to determine. Unlike many works that perform only a deterministic optimization, this work proposes a complete methodology to minimize the dynamic response of footbridges by optimizing the parameters of multiple tuned mass dampers (MTMD) taking into account uncertainties present in the parameters of the structure and also of the human excitation. For application purposes, a steel footbridge, based on a real structure, is studied. Three different scenarios for the MTMD are simulated. The proposed robust optimization problem is solved via the Circle-Inspired Optimization Algorithm (CIOA), a novel and efficient metaheuristic algorithm recently developed by the authors. The objective function is to minimize the mean maximum vertical displacement of the footbridge, whereas the design variables are the stiffness and damping constants of the MTMD. The results showed the excellent capacity of the proposed methodology, reducing the mean maximum vertical displacement by more than 36% and in a computational time about 9% less than using a classical genetic algorithm. The results obtained by the proposed methodology are also compared with results obtained through traditional TMD design methods, showing again the best performance of the proposed optimization method. Finally, an analysis of the maximum vertical acceleration showed a reduction of more than 91% for the three scenarios, leading the footbridge to acceleration values below the recommended comfort limits. Hence, the proposed methodology could be employed to optimize MTMD, improving the design of footbridges.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제84권4호
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• pp.489-502
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• 2022

This paper is aimed at developing an optimization-based Finite Element model updating approach for structural damage identification and quantification. A modal flexibility-based error function is introduced, which uses modal assurance criterion to formulate the updating problem as an optimization problem. Because of the inexplicit input/output relationship between the candidate solutions and the error function's output, a robust and efficient optimization algorithm should be employed to evaluate the solution domain and find the global extremum with high speed and accuracy. This paper proposes a new multi-stage Selective Particle Swarm Optimization (SPSO) algorithm to solve the optimization problem. The proposed multi-stage strategy not only fixes the premature convergence of the original Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, but also increases the speed of the search stage and reduces the corresponding computational costs, without changing or adding extra terms to the algorithm's formulation. Solving the introduced objective function with the proposed multi-stage SPSO leads to a smart feedback-wise and self-adjusting damage detection method, which can effectively assess the health of the structural systems. The performance and precision of the proposed method are verified and benchmarked against the original PSO and some of its most popular variants, including SPSO, DPSO, APSO, and MSPSO. For this purpose, two numerical examples of complex civil engineering structures under different damage patterns are studied. Comparative studies are also carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in the presence of measurement errors. Moreover, the robustness and accuracy of the method are validated by assessing the health of a six-story shear-type building structure tested on a shake table. The obtained results introduced the proposed method as an effective and robust damage detection method even if the first few vibration modes are utilized to form the objective function.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제90권1호
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• pp.27-40
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• 2024

The prediction of VIV amplitude is essential for the design and fatigue life estimation of steel tubes in tubular transmission towers. Limited to costly and time-consuming traditional experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods, a machine learning (ML)-based method is proposed to efficiently predict the VIV amplitude of steel tubes in transmission towers. Firstly, by introducing the first-order mode shape to the two-dimensional CFD method, a simplified response analysis method (SRAM) is presented to calculate the VIV amplitude of steel tubes in transmission towers, which enables to build a dataset for training ML models. Then, by taking mass ratio M^*, damping ratio ξ, and reduced velocity U^* as the input variables, a Kriging-based prediction method (KPM) is further proposed to estimate the VIV amplitude of steel tubes in transmission towers by combining the SRAM with the Kriging-based ML model. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methods are demonstrated by using three full-scale steel tubes with C-shaped, Cross-shaped, and Flange-plate joints, respectively. The results show that the SRAM can reasonably calculate the VIV amplitude, in which the relative errors of VIV maximum amplitude in three examples are less than 6%. Meanwhile, the KPM can well predict the VIV amplitude of steel tubes in transmission towers within the studied range of M^*, ξ and U^*. Particularly, the KPM presents an excellent capability in estimating the VIV maximum amplitude by using the reduced damping parameter S_G.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제33권1호
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• pp.27-39
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• 2024

In this study, the authors investigate the free vibration behavior of three-phases functionally graded sandwich plates using a novel nth-order shear deformation theory. These plates are composed of a homogeneous core and two face-sheet layers made of different functionally graded materials. This is the novel type of the sandwich structures that can be applied in many fields of mechanical engineering and industrial. The proposed theory only requires four unknown displacement functions, and the transverse displacement does not need to be separated into bending and shear parts, simplifying the theory. One noteworthy feature of the proposed theory is its ability to capture the parabolic distribution of transverse shear strains and stresses throughout the plate's thickness while ensuring zero values on the two free surfaces. By eliminating the need for shear correction factors, the theory further enhances computational efficiency. Equations of motion are established using Hamilton's principle and solved via Navier's solution. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed theory are verified by comparing results with available solutions. The authors then use the proposed theory to investigate the free vibration characteristics of three-phases functionally graded sandwich plates, considering the effects of parameters such as aspect ratio, side-to-thickness ratio, skin-core-skin thicknesses, and power-law indexes. Through careful analysis of the free vibration behavior of three-phases functionally graded sandwich plates, the work highlighted the significant roles played by individual material ingredients in influencing their frequencies.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제33권1호
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• pp.77-90
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• 2024

Waste foundry sand (WFS) is the waste product that cause environmental hazards. WFS can be used as a partial replacement of cement or fine aggregates in concrete. A database comprising 234 compressive strength tests of concrete fabricated with WFS is used. To construct the machine learning-based prediction models, the water-to-cement ratio, WFS replacement percentage, WFS-to-cement content ratio, and fineness modulus of WFS were considered as the model's inputs, and the compressive strength of concrete is set as the model's output. A base extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) model together with two hybrid XGBoost models mixed with the tunicate swarm algorithm (TSA) and the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) were applied. The role of TSA and SSA is to identify the optimum values of XGBoost hyperparameters to obtain the higher performance. The results of these hybrid techniques were compared with the results of the base XGBoost model in order to investigate and justify the implementation of optimisation algorithms. The results showed that the hybrid XGBoost models are faster and more accurate compared to the base XGBoost technique. The XGBoost-SSA model shows superior performance compared to previously published works in the literature, offering a reduced system error rate. Although the WFS-to-cement ratio is significant, the WFS replacement percentage has a smaller influence on the compressive strength of concrete. To improve the compressive strength of concrete fabricated with WFS, the simultaneous consideration of the water-to-cement ratio and fineness modulus of WFS is recommended.