• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.173-190
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• 2012

With recent growing interests in the Performance-Based Seismic Design and Assessment Methodology, more realistic modeling of a structural system is deemed essential in analyzing, designing, and evaluating both newly constructed and existing buildings under seismic events. Consequently, a shallow foundation element becomes an essential constituent in the implementation of this seismic design and assessment methodology. In this paper, a contact interface fiber section element is presented for use in modeling soil-shallow foundation systems. The assumption of a rigid footing on a Winkler-based soil rests simply on the Euler-Bernoulli's hypothesis on sectional kinematics. Fiber section discretization is employed to represent the contact interface sectional response. The hyperbolic function provides an adequate means of representing the stress-deformation behavior of each soil fiber. The element is simple but efficient in representing salient features of the soil-shallow foundation system (sliding, settling, and rocking). Two experimental results from centrifuge-scale and full-scale cyclic loading tests on shallow foundations are used to illustrate the model characteristics and verify the accuracy of the model. Based on this comprehensive model validation, it is observed that the model performs quite satisfactorily. It resembles reasonably well the experimental results in terms of moment, shear, settlement, and rotation demands. The hysteretic behavior of moment-rotation responses and the rotation-settlement feature are also captured well by the model.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.61 no.5
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• pp.617-624
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• 2017

Piezoelectric nanobeams are used in several nano electromechanical systems. The first step in designing these systems is conducting a vibration analysis. In this research, the free vibration of a piezoelectric nanobeam is analyzed by using the nonlocal elasticity theory. The nanobeam is modeled based on Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. Hamilton's principle is used to derive the equations of motion and also the boundary conditions of the system. The obtained equations of motion are solved by using both Galerkin and the Differential Quadrature (DQ) methods. The clamped-clamped and cantilever boundary conditions are analyzed and the effects of the applied voltage and nonlocal parameter on the natural frequencies and mode shapes are studied. The results show the success of Galerkin method in determining the natural frequencies. The results also show the influence of the nonlocal parameter on the natural frequencies. Increasing a positive voltage decreases the natural frequencies, while increasing a negative voltage increases them. It is also concluded that for the clamped parts of the beam and also other parts that encounter higher values of stress during free vibrations of the beam, anti-nodes in voltage mode shapes are observed. On the contrary, in the parts of the beam that the values of the induced stress are low, the values of the amplitude of the voltage mode shape are not significant. The obtained results and especially the mode shapes can be used in future studies on the forced vibrations of piezoelectric nanobeams based on Galerkin method.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.76 no.1
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• pp.141-151
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• 2020

This manuscript tends to investigate influences of nanoscale and surface energy on a static bending and free vibration of piezoelectric perforated nanobeam structural element, for the first time. Nonlocal differential elasticity theory of Eringen is manipulated to depict the long-range atoms interactions, by imposing length scale parameter. Surface energy dominated in nanoscale structure, is included in the proposed model by using Gurtin-Murdoch model. The coupling effect between nonlocal elasticity and surface energy is included in the proposed model. Constitutive and governing equations of nonlocal-surface perforated Euler-Bernoulli nanobeam are derived by Hamilton's principle. The distribution of electric potential for the piezoelectric nanobeam model is assumed to vary as a combination of a cosine and linear variation, which satisfies the Maxwell's equation. The proposed model is solved numerically by using the finite-element method (FEM). The present model is validated by comparing the obtained results with previously published works. The detailed parametric study is presented to examine effects of the number of holes, perforation size, nonlocal parameter, surface energy, boundary conditions, and external electric voltage on the electro-mechanical behaviors of piezoelectric perforated nanobeams. It is found that the effect of surface stresses becomes more significant as the thickness decreases in the range of nanometers. The effect of number of holes becomes significant in the region 0.2 ≤ α ≤ 0.8. The current model can be used in design of perforated nano-electro-mechanical systems (PNEMS).

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.843-848
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• 1998

The Usages of composite materials have been steadily on the rise in the industries of automobiles, air crafts, shipbuilding and other structures for transportations. Commonly required in those industries are light weight and high strength of the structures. Consequently, serious efforts in research have been focused on searching for light materials and on developments and characterizations of advanced substitutes including various kinds of composite materials. In this investigation, transversely isotropic composite materials are chosen and formed into two kinds of beams; Euler-Bernoulli beam(thin team) and Timoshenko beam(thick beam) for determinations of elastic constants. As an experimental technique Impulse Excitation Method is utilized to measure resonance frequencies of the beams of the composite materials in vibration tests. Elastic constants are evaluated from measured resonance frequencies for the two types of beams to observe and establish possible existence of effects of rotary inertia and shear deformations.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.149-162
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• 2011

The aim of this research is a comprehensive review and evaluation of beam theories resting on elastic foundations that used to model mode-I delamination in multidirectional laminated composite by DCB specimen. A compliance based approach is used to calculate critical strain energy release rate (SERR). Two well-known beam theories, i.e. Euler-Bernoulli (EB) and Timoshenko beams (TB), on Winkler and Pasternak elastic foundations (WEF and PEF) are considered. In each case, a closed-form solution is presented for compliance versus crack length, effective material properties and geometrical dimensions. Effective flexural modulus ($E_{fx}$) and out-of-plane extensional stiffness ($E_z$) are used in all models instead of transversely isotropic assumption in composite laminates. Eventually, the analytical solutions are compared with experimental results available in the literature for unidirectional ($[0^{\circ}]_6$) and antisymmetric angle-ply ($[{\pm}30^{\circ}]_5$, and $[{\pm}45^{\circ}]_5$) lay-ups. TB on WEF is a simple model that predicts more accurate results for compliance and SERR in unidirectional laminates in comparison to other models. TB on PEF, in accordance with Williams (1989) assumptions, is too stiff for unidirectional DCB specimens, whereas in angle-ply DCB specimens it gives more reliable results. That it shows the effects of transverse shear deformation and root rotation on SERR value in composite DCB specimens.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.279-286
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• 2020

In this study, we investigate the accuracy of higher order derivatives in the moving least square (MLS) difference method. An interpolation function is constructed by employing a Taylor series expansion via MLS approximation. The function is then applied to the mixed variational theorem in which the displacement and stress resultants are treated as independent variables. The higher order derivatives are evaluated by solving simply supported beams and cantilevers. The results are compared with the analytical solutions in terms of the order of polynomials, support size of the weighting function, and number of nodes. The accuracy of the higher order derivatives improves with the employment of the mean value theorem, especially for very high-order derivatives (e.g., above fourth-order derivatives), which are important in a classical asymptotic analysis.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.317-346
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• 2019

Performance assessment of pavements proves useful, in terms of handling the ride quality, controlling the travel time of vehicles and adequate maintenance of pavements. Roughness profiles provide a good measure of the deteriorating condition of the pavement. For the accurate estimates of pavement roughness from dynamic vehicle responses, vehicle parameters should be known accurately. Information on vehicle parameters is uncertain, due to the wear and tear over time. Hence, condition monitoring of pavement requires the identification of pavement roughness along with vehicle parameters. The present study proposes a scheme which estimates the roughness profile of the pavement with the use of accurate estimates of vehicle parameters computed in parallel. Pavement model used in this study is a two-layer Euler-Bernoulli beam resting on a nonlinear Pasternak foundation. The asphalt topping of the pavement in the top layer is modeled as viscoelastic, and the base course bottom layer is modeled as elastic. The viscoelastic response of the top layer is modeled with the help of the Burgers model. The vehicle model considered in this study is a half car model, fitted with accelerometers at specified points. The identification of the coupled system of vehicle-pavement interaction employs a coupled scheme of an unbiased minimum variance estimator and an optimization scheme. The partitioning of observed noisy quantities to be used in the two schemes is investigated in detail before the analysis. The unbiased minimum variance estimator (MVE) make use of a linear state-space formulation including roughness, to overcome the linearization difficulties as in conventional nonlinear filters. MVE gives estimates for the unknown input and fed into the optimization scheme to yield estimates of vehicle parameters. The issue of ill-posedness of the problem is dealt with by introducing a regularization equivalent term in the objective function, specifically where a large number of parameters are to be estimated. Effect of different objective functions is also studied. The outcome of this research is an overall measure of pavement condition.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.657-668
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• 2001

Fiber reinforced cementitious composites are nowadays widely applied in civil engineering. The postcracking performance of this material depends on the interaction between a steel fiber, which is obliquely across a crack, and its surrounding matrix. While the partly debonded steel fiber is subjected to pulling out from the matrix and simultaneously subjected to transverse force, it may be modelled as a Bernoulli-Euler beam partly supported on an elastic foundation with non-linearly varying modulus. The fiber bridging the crack may be cut into two parts to simplify the problem (Leung and Li 1992). To obtain the transverse displacement at the cut end of the fiber (Fig. 1), it is convenient to directly solve the corresponding differential equation. At the first glance, it is a classical beam on foundation problem. However, the differential equation is not analytically solvable due to the non-linear distribution of the foundation stiffness. Moreover, since the second order deformation effect is included, the boundary conditions become complex and hence conventional numerical tools such as the spline or difference methods may not be sufficient. In this study, moment equilibrium is the basis for formulation of the fundamental differential equation for the beam (Timoshenko 1956). For the cantilever part of the beam, direct integration is performed. For the non-linearly supported part, a transformation is carried out to reduce the higher order differential equation into one order simultaneous equations. The Runge-Kutta technique is employed for the solution within the boundary domain. Finally, multi-dimensional optimization approaches are carefully tested and applied to find the boundary values that are of interest. The numerical solution procedure is demonstrated to be stable and convergent.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.355-374
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• 2016

This paper presents and compares a one-dimensional (1D) bending theory for piezoelectric thin beam-type structures with resistive-inductive electrodes to ANSYS$^{(R)}$ three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) analysis. In particular, the lateral deflections and vibrations of slender piezoelectric beams are considered. The peculiarity of the piezoelectric beam model is the modeling of electrodes in such a manner that is does not fulfill the equipotential area condition. The case of ideal, perfectly conductive electrodes is a special case of our 1D model. Two-coupled partial differential equations are obtained for the lateral deflection and for the voltage distribution along the electrodes: the first one is an extended Bernoulli-Euler beam equation (second-order in time, forth order in space) and the second one the so-called Telegrapher's equation (second-order in time and space). Analytical results of our theory are validated by 3D electromechanically coupled FE simulations with ANSYS$^{(R)}$. A clamped-hinged beam is considered with various types of electrodes for the piezoelectric layers, which can be either resistive and/or inductive. A natural frequency analysis as well as quasi-static and dynamic simulations are performed. A good agreement between the extended beam theory and the FE results is found. Finally, the practical relevance of this type of electrodes is shown. It is found that the damping capability of properly tuned resistive or resistive-inductive electrodes exceeds the damping performance of beams, where the electrodes are simply linked to an optimized impedance.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.453-475
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• 2009

The literature regarding the free vibration analysis of Bernoulli-Euler and Timoshenko beams on elastic soil is plenty, but the free vibration analysis of Reddy-Bickford beams on elastic soil with/without axial force effect using the Differential Transform Method (DTM) has not been investigated by any of the studies in open literature so far. In this study, the free vibration analysis of axially loaded Reddy-Bickford beam on elastic soil is carried out by using DTM. The model has six degrees of freedom at the two ends, one transverse displacement and two rotations, and the end forces are a shear force and two end moments in this study. The governing differential equations of motion of the rectangular beam in free vibration are derived using Hamilton's principle and considering rotatory inertia. Parameters for the relative stiffness, stiffness ratio and nondimensionalized multiplication factor for the axial compressive force are incorporated into the equations of motion in order to investigate their effects on the natural frequencies. At first, the terms are found directly from the analytical solutions of the differential equations that describe the deformations of the cross-section according to the high-order theory. After the analytical solution, an efficient and easy mathematical technique called DTM is used to solve the governing differential equations of the motion. The calculated natural frequencies of one end fixed and the other end simply supported Reddy-Bickford beam on elastic soil using DTM are tabulated in several tables and figures and are compared with the results of the analytical solution where a very good agreement is observed and the mode shapes are presented in graphs.