• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.92 no.2
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• pp.163-172
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• 2024

This paper intends to analyze the nonlinear forced vibrations of functionally graded material (FGM) beams with initial geometrical defects in hygro-thermal ambiences. For this purpose, we assume that the correlation properties of the material alter along the thickness direction in succession and the surface of the beam is subjected to humid and thermal loads. Based on the Euler Bernoulli beam theory and geometrical non-linearity, we use the Hamiltonian principle to formulate a theoretical model with consideration of the hygrothermal effects. Galerkin's technique has been proposed for the control equations of discrete systems. The non-linear primary resonances are acquired by applying the modified Lindstedt-Poincare method (MLP). Verify the reliability of the data obtained through comparison with literature. The non-linear resonance response is reflected by amplitude-frequency response curves. The numerical results indicate that the resonances of FGM beams include three non-linear characteristics, namely hard springs, soft springs and soft-hard spring types. The response modalities of the structure may transform between those non-linear characteristics when material properties, spring coefficients, geometric defect values, temperature-humidity loads and even the external stimulus generate variations.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Wind turbine blades are increasing in magnitude without a proportional increase of stiffness for which reason geometrical and inertial nonlinearities become increasingly important. Often these effects are analysed using a nonlinear truncated expansion in undamped fixed base mode shapes of a blade, modelling geometrical and inertial nonlinear couplings in the fundamental flap and edge direction. The purpose of this article is to examine the applicability of such a reduced-degree-of-freedom model in predicting the nonlinear response and stability of a blade by comparison to a full model based on a nonlinear co-rotating FE formulation. By use of the reduced-degree-of-freedom model it is shown that under strong resonance excitation of the fundamental flap or edge modes, significant energy is transferred to higher modes due to parametric or nonlinear coupling terms, which influence the response and stability conditions. It is demonstrated that the response predicted by such models in some cases becomes instable or chaotic. However, as a consequence of the energy flow the stability is increased and the tendency of chaotic vibrations is reduced as the number of modes are increased. The FE model representing the case of infinitely many included modes, is shown to predict stable and ordered response for all considered parameters. Further, the analysis shows that the reduced-degree-of-freedom model of relatively low order overestimates the response near resonance peaks, which is a consequence of the small number of included modes. The qualitative erratic response and stability prediction of the reduced order models take place at frequencies slightly above normal operation. However, for normal operation of the wind turbine without resonance excitation 4 modes in the reduced-degree-of-freedom model perform acceptable.

• 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.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.44 no.5
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• pp.721-740
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• 2022

In this paper, an accurate kinematic model has been developed to study the mechanical response of functionally graded (FG) sandwich beams, mainly covering the bending, buckling and free vibration problems. The studied structure with homogeneous hardcore and softcore is considered to be simply supported in the edges. The present model uses a new refined shear deformation beam theory (RSDBT) in which the displacement field is improved over the other existing high-order shear deformation beam theories (HSDBTs). The present model provides good accuracy and considers a nonlinear transverse shear deformation shape function, since it is constructed with only two unknown variables as the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory but complies with the shear stress-free boundary conditions on the upper and lower surfaces of the beam without employing shear correction factors. The sandwich beams are composed of two FG skins and a homogeneous core wherein the material properties of the skins are assumed to vary gradually and continuously in the thickness direction according to the power-law distribution of volume fraction of the constituents. The governing equations are drawn by implementing Hamilton's principle and solved by means of the Navier's technique. Numerical computations in the non-dimensional terms of transverse displacement, stresses, critical buckling load and natural frequencies obtained by using the proposed model are compared with those predicted by other beam theories to confirm the performance of the proposed theory and to verify the accuracy of the kinematic model.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.143-161
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• 2020

In nanosized structures as the surface area to the bulk volume ratio increases the classical continuum mechanics approaches fails to investigate the mechanical behavior of such structures. In perforated nanobeam structures, more decrease in the bulk volume is obtained due to perforation process thus nonclassical continuum approaches should be employed for reliable investigation of the mechanical behavior these structures. This article introduces an analytical methodology to investigate the size dependent, surface energy, and perforation impacts on the nonclassical bending behavior of regularly squared cutout nanobeam structures for the first time. To do this, geometrical model for both bulk and surface characteristics is developed for regularly squared perforated nanobeams. Based on the proposed geometrical model, the nonclassical Gurtin-Murdoch surface elasticity model is adopted and modified to incorporate the surface energy effects in perforated nanobeams. To investigate the effect of shear deformation associated with cutout process, both Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko beams theories are developed. Mathematical model for perforated nanobeam structure including surface energy effects are derived in comprehensive procedure and nonclassical boundary conditions are presented. Closed forms for the nonclassical bending and rotational displacements are derived for both theories considering all classical and nonclassical kinematics and kinetics boundary conditions. Additionally, both uniformly distributed and concentrated loads are considered. The developed methodology is verified and compared with the available results and an excellent agreement is noticed. Both classical and nonclassical bending profiles for both thin and thick perforated nanobeams are investigated. Numerical results are obtained to illustrate effects of beam filling ratio, the number of hole rows through the cross section, surface material characteristics, beam slenderness ratio as well as the boundary and loading conditions on the non-classical bending behavior of perforated nanobeams in the presence of surface effects. It is found that, the surface residual stress has more significant effect on the bending deflection compared with the corresponding effect of the surface elasticity, Es. The obtained results are supportive for the design, analysis and manufacturing of perforated nanobeams.

• 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.

• International journal of steel structures
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1440-1463
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• 2018

The Wagner coefficient is a key parameter used to describe the inelastic lateral-torsional buckling (LTB) behaviour of the I-beam, since even for a doubly-symmetric I-section with residual stress, it becomes a monosymmetric I-section due to the characteristics of the non-symmetrical distribution of plastic regions. However, so far no theoretical derivation on the energy equation and Wagner's coefficient have been presented due to the limitation of Vlasov's buckling theory. In order to simplify the nonlinear analysis and calculation, this paper presents a simplified mechanical model and an analytical solution for doubly-symmetric I-beams under pure bending, in which residual stresses and yielding are taken into account. According to the plate-beam theory proposed by the lead author, the energy equation for the inelastic LTB of an I-beam is derived in detail, using only the Euler-Bernoulli beam model and the Kirchhoff-plate model. In this derivation, the concept of the instantaneous shear centre is used and its position can be determined naturally by the condition that the coefficient of the cross-term in the strain energy should be zero; formulae for both the critical moment and the corresponding critical beam length are proposed based upon the analytical buckling equation. An analytical formula of the Wagner coefficient is obtained and the validity of Wagner hypothesis is reconfirmed. Finally, the accuracy of the analytical solution is verified by a FEM solution based upon a bi-modulus model of I-beams. It is found that the critical moments given by the analytical solution almost is identical to those given by Trahair's formulae, and hence the analytical solution can be used as a benchmark to verify the results obtained by other numerical algorithms for inelastic LTB behaviour.

• Advances in nano research
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.15-24
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• 2021

Microtubules (MTs) are the main part of the cytoskeleton in living eukaryotic cells. In this article, a mechanical model of MT buckling, considering the modified strain gradient theory, is analytically examined. The MT is assumed as a cylindrical beam and a new single variable trigonometric beam theory is developed in conjunction with a modified strain gradient model. The main benefit of the present formulation is shown in its new kinematic where we found only one unknown as the Euler-Bernoulli beam model, which is even less than the Timoshenko beam model. The governing equations are deduced by considering virtual work principle. The effectiveness of the present method is checked by comparing the obtained results with those reported by other higher shear deformation beam theory involving a higher number of unknowns. It is shown that microstructure-dependent response is more important when material length scale parameters are closer to the outer diameter of MTs. Also, it can be confirmed that influences of shear deformation become more considerable for smaller shear modulus and aspect ratios.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.487-502
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• 2023

In the realm of nanotechnology, the nonlocal strain gradient theory takes center stage as it scrutinizes the behavior of spinning cantilever nanobeams and nanotubes, pivotal components supporting various mechanical movements in sport structures. The dynamics of these structures have sparked debates within the scientific community, with some contending that nonlocal cantilever models fail to predict dynamic softening, while others propose that they can indeed exhibit stiffness softening characteristics. To address these disparities, this paper investigates the dynamic response of a nonlocal cantilever cylindrical beam under the influence of external discontinuous dynamic loads. The study employs four distinct models: the Euler-Bernoulli beam model, Timoshenko beam model, higher-order beam model, and a novel higher-order tube model. These models account for the effects of functionally graded materials (FGMs) in the radial tube direction, giving rise to nanotubes with varying properties. The Hamilton principle is employed to formulate the governing differential equations and precise boundary conditions. These equations are subsequently solved using the generalized differential quadrature element technique (GDQEM). This research not only advances our understanding of the dynamic behavior of nanotubes but also reveals the intriguing phenomena of both hardening and softening in the nonlocal parameter within cantilever nanostructures. Moreover, the findings hold promise for practical applications, including drug delivery, where the controlled vibrations of nanotubes can enhance the precision and efficiency of medication transport within the human body. By exploring the multifaceted characteristics of nanotubes, this study not only contributes to the design and manufacturing of rotating nanostructures but also offers insights into their potential role in revolutionizing drug delivery systems.

• 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.