• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.45-54
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• 2013

In this paper, a theoretical weight-reduction method was suggested to substitute an underframe material of a box-type bodyshell having cut-outs with an alternative light-weight material. To utilize the material substitution method previously developed for a box-type hybrid bodyshell not having cut-outs, we derived a box-type baseline model without cut-outs which is similar to the stiffness condition of a box-type bodyshell having cut-outs. To do this, the thicknesses of roof and walls of the baseline model were determined such that the deflection of the baseline model under a distributed vertical load condition is equal to the sum of the theoretical section deflections of the original box model with cut-outs. Next, to derive a hybrid bodyshell by under-frame material substitution, the material substitution method for a box-type hybrid bodyshell without cut-outs was applied to the box-type baseline model. Finally, we compared the FE simulation results of the derived hybrid bodyshells having cut-outs for various materials with the theoretical results of the suggested method, and we obtained their good correlations.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.147-160
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• 2006

GA-based fuzzy optimum design algorithm incorporated with the refined plastic hinge analysis method is presented in this study. In the refined plastic hinge analysis method, geometric nonlinearity is considered by using the stability functions of the beam-column members. Material nonlinearity is also considered by using the gradual stiffness degradation model, which considers the effects of residual stresses, moment redistribution through the occurence of plastic hinges, and the geometric imperfections of the members. In the genetic algorithm, the tournament selection method and the total weight of the steel frames. The requirements of load-carrying capacity, serviceability, ductility, and constructabil ity are used as the constraint conditions. In fuzzy optimization, for crisp objective function and fuzzy constraint s, the tolerance that is accepted is 5% of the constraints. Furthermore, a level-cut method is presented from 0 to 1 at a 0 .2 interval, with the use of the nonmembership function, to solve fuzzy-optimization problems. The values of conventional GA optimization and fuzzy GA optimization are compared in several examples of steel structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.69 no.3
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• pp.257-268
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• 2019

Infills are as important members in structural design as beams, columns and braces. They have significant effect on structural behavior. Because of lots of variables in infills like material non-linear behavior, the interaction between frames and infill, etc., the infills performance during an earthquake is complicated, so have led designers do not consider the effect of infills in designing the structure. However, the experimental studies revealed that the infills have the remarkable effect on structure behavior. As if these effects ignored, it might occur soft-story phenomena, torsion or short-column effects on the structures. One simple and appropriate method for considering the infills effects in analyzing, is replacing the infills with diagonal compression strut with the same performance of real infill, instead of designing the whole infill. Because of too many uncertainties, codes and researchers gave many expressions that were not as the same as the others. The major intent of this paper is calculation the width of this diagonal strut, which has the most characteristics of infill. This paper by comprehensive on different parameters like the modulus of young or moment of inertia of columns presents a new formula for achieving the equivalent strut width. In fact, this new formula is extracted from about 60 FEM analyses models. It can be said that this formula is very efficient and accurate in estimating the equivalent strut width, considering the large number of effective parameters relative to similar relationships provided by other researchers. In most cases, the results are so close to the values obtained by the FEM. In this formula, the effect of out of plane buckling is neglected and this formula is used just in steel structures. Also, the thickness of infill panel, and the lateral force applied to frame are constant. In addition, this new formula is just for modeling the lateral stiffness. Obtaining the nearest response in analyzing is important to the designers, so this new formula can help them to reach more accurate response among a lot of experimental equations proposed by researchers.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.133-148
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• 2021

The paper presents a simplified force-based seismic design procedure for the preliminary design of steel haunch retrofitting for the seismic upgrade of deficient RC frames. The procedure involved constructing a site-specific seismic design spectrum for the site, which is transformed into seismic base shear coefficient demand, using an applicable response modification factor, that defines base shear force for seismic analysis of the structure. Recent experimental campaign; involving shake table testing of ten (10), and quasi-static cyclic testing of two (02), 1:3 reduced scale RC frame models, carried out for the seismic performance assessment of both deficient and retrofitted structures has provided the basis to calculate retrofit-specific response modification factor Rretrofitted. The haunch retrofitting technique enhanced the structural stiffness, strength, and ductility, hence, increased the structural response modification factor, which is mainly dependent on the applied retrofit scheme. An additional retrofit effectiveness factor (ΩR) is proposed for the deficient structure's response modification factor Rdeficient, representing the retrofit effectiveness (ΩR=Rretrofitted /Rdeficient), to calculate components' moment and shear demands for the retrofitted structure. The experimental campaign revealed that regardless of the deficient structures' characteristics, the ΩR factor remains fairly the unchanged, which is encouraging to generalize the design procedure. Haunch configuration is finalized that avoid brittle hinging of beam-column joints and ensure ductile beam yielding. Example case study for the seismic retrofit designs of RC frames are presented, which were validated through equivalent lateral load analysis using elastic model and response history analysis of finite-element based inelastic model, showing reasonable performance of the proposed design procedure. The proposed design has the advantage to provide a seismic zone-specific design solution, and also, to suggest if any additional measure is required to enhance the strength/deformability of beams and columns.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.457-472
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• 2021

Reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Taiwan have suffered failure from strong earthquakes, which was magnified by the non-ductile detailing frames. Inadequate reinforcement as a consequence of the design philosophy prior to the introduction of current standards resulted in severe damage in the column and beam-column joint (BCJ). This study establishes a finite element analysis (FEA) of the non-ductile detailing RC column, BCJ, and three-story building that was previously tested through a tri-axial shaking table test. The results were then validated to laboratory specimens having the exact same dimensions and properties. FEA simulation integrates the concrete damage plasticity model and the elastic-perfectly plastic model for steel. The load-displacement responses of the column and BCJ specimens obtained from FEA were in a reasonable agreement with the experimental curves. The resulting initial stiffness and maximum base shear were found to be a close approximation to the experimental results. Also, the findings of a dynamic analysis of the three-story building showed that the time-history data of acceleration and displacement correlated well with the shaking table test results. This indicates the FEA implementation can be effectively used to predict the RC frame performance and failure mode under seismic loads.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.497-512
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• 2023

Using light weight concrete as infill material in conventional cold-formed steel (CFS) shear wall systems can considerably increase their load bearing capacity, ductility, integrity and fire resistance. The compressive strength of the filler concrete is a key factor affecting the structural behaviour of the composite wall systems, and therefore, achieving maximum compressive strength in lightweight concrete while maintaining its lightweight properties is of significant importance. In this study a new type of optimum polystyrene lightweight concrete (OPLC) with high compressive strength is developed for infill material in composite CFS shear wall systems. To study the seismic behaviour of the OPLC-filled CFS shear wall systems, two full scale wall specimens are tested under cyclic loading condition. The effects of OPLC on load-bearing capacity, failure mode, ductility, energy dissipation capacity, and stiffness degradation of the walls are investigated. It is shown that the use of OPLC as infill in CFS shear walls can considerably improve their seismic performance by: (i) preventing the premature buckling of the stud members, and (ii) changing the dominant failure mode from brittle to ductile thanks to the bond-slip behaviour between OPLC and CFS studs. It is also shown that the design equations proposed by EC8 and ACI 318-14 standards overestimate the shear force capacity of OPLC-filled CFS shear wall systems by up to 80%. This shows it is necessary to propose methods with higher efficiency to predict the capacity of these systems for practical applications.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.421-436
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• 2023

This paper presents a vibration displacement measurement and damage identification method for a space truss structure from its vibration videos. Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) algorithm is combined with adaptive threshold strategy to detect the feature points of high quality within the Region of Interest (ROI), around each node of the truss structure. Then these points are tracked by Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) algorithm along the video frame sequences to obtain the vibration displacement time histories. For some cases with the image plane not parallel to the truss structural plane, the scale factors cannot be applied directly. Therefore, these videos are processed with homography transformation. After scale factor adaptation, tracking results are expressed in physical units and compared with ground truth data. The main operational frequencies and the corresponding mode shapes are identified by using Subspace Stochastic Identification (SSI) from the obtained vibration displacement responses and compared with ground truth data. Structural damages are quantified by elemental stiffness reductions. A Bayesian inference-based objective function is constructed based on natural frequencies to identify the damage by model updating. The Success-History based Adaptive Differential Evolution with Linear Population Size Reduction (L-SHADE) is applied to minimise the objective function by tuning the damage parameter of each element. The locations and severities of damage in each case are then identified. The accuracy and effectiveness are verified by comparison of the identified results with the ground truth data.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.339-351
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• 2022

Evaluating the current condition of existing structures is of primary importance for economic and safety reasons. This can be addressed by Structural System Identification (SSI). A reliable static SSI depends on well-designed sensor configuration and loading cases, as well as efficient parameter estimation algorithms. Static SSI by the Measurement Error-Minimizing Observability Method (MEMOM) is a model-based deterministic static SSI method that could estimate structural parameters from static responses. In the current state of the art, this method is only applicable when structures are subjected to one loading case. This might lead to lack of information in some local regions of the structure (such as the null curvatures zones). To address this issue, the SSI by MEMOM using multiple loading cases is proposed in this work. Observability equations obtained from different loading cases are concatenated simultaneously and an optimization procedure is introduced to obtain the estimations by minimizing the discrepancy between the predicted response and the measured one. In addition, a Genetic-Algorithm (GA)-based Optimal Sensor Placement (OSP) method is proposed to tackle the OSP problem under multiple static loading cases for the very first time. In this approach, the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)'s determinant is used as the metric of the goodness of sensor configurations. The numerical examples of a 3-span continuous bridge and a 13-story frame, are analyzed to validate the applicability of the extended SSI by MEMOM and the GA-based OSP method.

• Architectural research
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2023

Structural ageing influences the structural performance in a negative way by reducing the seismic resilience of the structure which makes it a major concern around the world. Retrofitting is considered to be a pragmatic and feasible solution to address this issue. Numerous retrofitting techniques are devised by researchers over the years. The viability of using steel bracings as retrofitting component is evaluated on a G+30 storied building model designed according to ACI318-14 and ASCE 7-16. Four different types of steel bracing arrangements (V, Inverted V/ Chevron, Cross/ X, Diagonal) are assessed in the model developed in commercial nu-merical analysis software while considering both material and geometric nonlinearities. Reducing displacement and cost in the structures indicates that the design is safe and economical. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to find the best bracing system that causes minimum displacement, which indicates maximum lateral stiffness. To evaluate the seismic vulnerability of each system, incremental dynamic analysis was conducted to develop fragility curves, followed by the formation of collapse margin ratio (CMR) as stipulated in FEMA P695 and finally, a cost estimation was made for each system. The outcomes revealed that the effects of ge-ometric nonlinearity tend to evoke hazardous consequences if not considered in the structural design. Probabilistic seismic and economic probes indicated the superior performance of V braced frame system and its competency to be a germane technique for retrofitting.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.229-245
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• 2023

The absence of excitation measurements may pose a big challenge in the application of structural damage identification owing to the fact that substantial effort is needed to reconstruct or identify unknown input force. To address this issue, in this paper, an iterative strategy, a synergy of Tikhonov regularization method for force identification and modified Jaya algorithm (M-Jaya) for stiffness parameter identification, is developed for damage identification with partial output-only responses. On the one hand, the probabilistic clustering learning technique and nonlinear updating equation are introduced to improve the performance of standard Jaya algorithm. On the other hand, to deal with the difficulty of selection the appropriate regularization parameters in traditional Tikhonov regularization, an improved L-curve method based on B-spline interpolation function is presented. The applicability and effectiveness of the iterative strategy for simultaneous identification of structural damages and unknown input excitation is validated by numerical simulation on a 21-bar truss structure subjected to ambient excitation under noise free and contaminated measurements cases, as well as a series of experimental tests on a five-floor steel frame structure excited by sinusoidal force. The results from these numerical and experimental studies demonstrate that the proposed identification strategy can accurately and effectively identify damage locations and extents without the requirement of force measurements. The proposed M-Jaya algorithm provides more satisfactory performance than genetic algorithm, Gaussian bare-bones artificial bee colony and Jaya algorithm.