• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.815-829
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• 2012

This paper proposes a nonlinear computational modeling approach for the behaviors of structural systems subjected to fire. The proposed modeling approach consists of fire dynamics analysis, nonlinear transient-heat transfer analysis for predicting thermal distributions, and thermomechanical analysis for structural behaviors. For concretes, transient heat formulations are written considering temperature dependent heat conduction and specific heat capacity and included within the thermomechanical analyses. Also, temperature dependent stress-strain behaviors including compression hardening and tension softening effects are implemented within the analyses. The proposed modeling technique for transient heat and thermomechanical analyses is first validated with experimental data of reinforced concrete (RC) beams subjected to high temperatures, and then applied to a bridge model. The bridge model is generated to simulate the fire incident occurred by a gas truck on April 29, 2007 in Oakland California, USA. From the simulation, not only temperature distributions and deformations of the bridge can be found, but critical locations and time frame where collapse occurs can be predicted. The analytical results from the simulation are qualitatively compared with the real incident and show good agreements.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.47-69
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• 2024

Pounding of structures may result in considerable damages, to the extent of total failure during severe lateral loading events (e.g., earthquakes and wind). With the new generation of tall buildings in densely occupied locations, wind-induced pounding becomes of higher risk due to such structures' large deflections. This paper aims to develop mathematical formulations to determine the maximum pounding force when two adjacent structures come into contact. The study will first investigate wind-induced pounding forces of two equal-height structures with similar dynamic properties. The wind loads will be extracted from the Large Eddy Simulation models and applied to a Finite Element Method model to determine deflections and pounding forces. A Genetic Algorithm is lastly utilized to optimize fitting parameters used to correlate the maximum pounding force to the governing structural parameters. The results of the wind-induced pounding show that structures with a higher natural frequency will produce lower maximum pounding forces than those of the same structure with a lower natural frequency. In addition, taller structures are more susceptible to stronger pounding forces at closer separation distances. It was also found that the complexity of the mathematical formula from optimization depends on achieving a more accurate mapping for the trained database.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.37-49
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• 2000

This paper is for the first essential study on the development of unified finite element formulations for solving problems related to the dynamics/thermoelastics behavior of solids. In the first part of formulations, the finite element method is based on the introduction of a new quantity defined as heat displacement, which allows the heat conduction equations to be written in a form equivalent to the equation of motion, and the equations of coupled thermoelasticity to be written in a unified form. The equations obtained are used to express a variational formulation which, together with the concept of generalized coordinates, yields a set of differential equations with the time as an independent variable. Using the Laplace transform, the resulting finite element equations are described in the transform domain. In the second, the Laplace transform is applied to both the equation of heat conduction derived in the first part and the equations of motions and their corresponding boundary conditions, which is referred to the transformed equation. Selections of interpolation functions dependent on only the space variable and an application of the weighted residual method to the coupled equation result in the necessary finite element matrices in the transformed domain. Finally, to prove the validity of two approaches, a comparison with one finite element equation and the other is made term by term.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.359-371
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• 2013

This paper is the first paper among two papers which constitute the paper about the rigid body dynamic analysis on the spent nuclear disposal canister under accidental drop and impact on to the ground. This paper performed the general theoretical study on the rigid body dynamic analysis. Through this study the impulsive force which is occurring in the spent nuclear fuel disposal canister under accidental drop and impact to the ground and required for the structural safety design of the canister is intended to be theoretically formulated. The main content of the theoretical study is about the equation of motion in the multibody dynamics. On the basis of this study the impulsive force which is occurring in the multibody in the case of collision between multibody is theoretically formulated. The application of this theoretically formulated impulsive force to computing the impulsive force occurring in the spent nuclear fuel disposal canister under accidental drop and impact to the ground is investigated.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.91-103
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• 2023

Tuned liquid dampers (TLDs) are increasingly being used as efficient dynamic vibration absorbers to mitigate wind-induced vibration in super high-rise buildings. However, the damping characteristics of screens and the control effectiveness of actual structures must be investigated to improve the reliability of TLDs in engineering applications. In this study, a numerical TLD model is developed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and a simulation method for achieving the coupled vibration of the structure and TLD is proposed. The numerical results are verified using shaking table tests, and the effects of the solidity ratio and screen position on the TLD damping ratios are investigated. The TLD control effectiveness is obtained by simulating the wind-induced vibration response of a full-scale structure-TLD system to determine the optimal screen solidity ratio. The effects of the structural frequency, damping ratio, and wind load amplitude on the TLD performance are further analyzed. The TLD damping ratio increases nonlinearly with the solidity ratio, and it increases with the screens towards the tank center and then decreases slightly owing to the hydrodynamic interaction between screens. Full-scale coupled simulations demonstrated that the optimal TLD control effectiveness was achieved when the solidity ratio was 0.46. In addition, structural frequency shifts can significantly weaken the TLD performance. The control effectiveness decreases with an increase in the structural damping ratio, and is insensitive to the wind load amplitude within a certain range, implying that the TLD has a stable damping performance over a range of wind speed variations.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.382-393
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• 2006

Mechanical system dynamics plays an important role in the area of computational structural biology. Elastic network models (ENMs) for macromolecules (e.g., polymers, proteins, and nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA) have been developed to understand the relationship between their structure and biological function. For example. a protein, which is basically a folded polypeptide chain, can be simply modeled as a mass-spring system from the mechanical viewpoint. Since the conformational flexibility of a protein is dominantly subject to its chemical bond interactions (e.g., covalent bonds, salt bridges, and hydrogen bonds), these constraints can be modeled as linear spring connections between spatially proximal representatives in a variety of coarse-grained ENMs. Coarse-graining approaches enable one to simulate harmonic and anharmonic motions of large macromolecules in a PC, while all-atom based molecular dynamics (MD) simulation has been conventionally performed with an aid of supercomputer. A harmonic analysis of a macroscopic mechanical system, called normal mode analysis, has been adopted to analyze thermal fluctuations of a microscopic biological system around its equilibrium state. Furthermore, a structure-based system optimization, called elastic network interpolation, has been developed to predict nonlinear transition (or folding) pathways between two different functional states of a same macromolecule. The good agreement of simulation and experiment allows the employment of coarse-grained ENMs as a versatile tool for the study of macromolecular dynamics.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.273-287
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• 1995

Stochastic response of systems to random excitation can be estimated by direct integration methods in the time domain such as the stochastic central difference method (SCDM). In this paper, the SCDM is applied to compute the variance and covariance in response of linear and nonlinear structures subjected to random excitation. The accuracy of the SCDM is assessed using two-DOF systems with both deterministic and random material properties excited by white noise. For the former case, closed-form solutions can be obtained. Numerical results also are presented for a simply supported geometrically nonlinear beam. The stiffness of this beam is modeled as a random field, and the beam is idealized by the stochastic finite element method. A perturbation technique is applied to formulate the equations of motion of the system, and the dynamic structural response statistics are obtained in a time domain analysis. The effect of variations in structural parameters and the numerical stability of the SCDM also are examined.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.369-376
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• 2016

In this study, a numerical analysis framework for investigating the nonlinear behavior of structures under fire conditions is presented. In particular, analysis procedure combining fire-driven flow simulation and thermo-mechanical analysis is discussed to investigate the mechanical behavior of fire-exposed representative volume structures made of steel and concrete, respectively. First of all, fire-driven flow analysis is conducted using Fire Dynamics Simulator(FDS) in a rectangular parallelepiped domain containing the structure. The FDS simulation yields the time history of temperature on the surface of the structure under fire conditions. Second, mechanical responses of the fire-exposed structure with respect to prescribed uniformly distributed loads are calculated by a coupled thermo-mechanical analysis using the time-varying surface temperature as boundary conditions. Material nonlinearities of steel and concrete have been considered in the thermo-mechanical analysis. A series of numerical results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the multiphysics structural fire analysis for investigating the structural behavior under fire conditions.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.247-254
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• 2013

In this paper, dynamic response analysis of a heave compensation system is performed for offshore drilling operations based on multibody dynamics. With this simulation, the efficiency of the heave compensation system can be virtually confirmed before it is applied to drilling operations. The heave compensation system installed on a semi-submersible platform consists of a passive and an active heave compensator. The passive and active heave compensator are composed of several bodies that are connected to each other with various types of joints. Therefore, to carry out the dynamic response analysis, the dynamics kernel was developed based on mutibody dynamics. To construct the equations of motion of the multibody system and to determine the unknown accelerations and constraint forces, the recursive Newton-Euler formulation was adapted. Functions of the developed dynamics kernel were verified by comparing them with other commercial dynamics kernels. The hydrostatic force with nonlinear effects, the linearized hydrodynamic force, and the pneumatic and hydraulic control forces were considered as the external forces that act on the platform of the semi-submersible rig and the heave compensation system. The dynamic simulation of the heave compensation system of the semi-submersible rig, which is available for drilling operations with a 3,600m water depth, was carried out. From the results of the simulation, the efficiency of the heave compensation system were evaluated before they were applied to the offshore drilling operations. Moreover, the calculated constraint forces could serve as reference data for the design of the mechanical system.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.548-555
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• 2005

Since soil-structure interactions are one of the most important subjects in the structural/foundation engineering, much study concerning the soil-structure interactions had been carried out. One of typical structures related to the soil-structure interactions is the strip foundation which is basically defined as the beam or strip rested on or supported by the soils. At the present time, lack of studies on dynamic problems related to the strip foundations is still found in the literature. From these viewpoint, this paper aims to theoretically investigate dynamics of the elliptic strip foundations and also to present the practical engineering data for the design purpose. Differential equations governing the free, out-of-plane vibrations of such sap foundations we derived, in which effects of the rotatory and torsional inertias and also shear deformation are included although the warping of the cross-section is excluded. Governing differential equations subjected to the boundary conditions of free-free end constraints are numerically solved for obtaining the natural frequencies and mode shapes by using the numerical integration technique and the numerical method of non-linear equation.