• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.78 no.4
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• pp.485-496
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• 2021

So far analytical methods on collapse assessment of three-dimensional (3-D) steel frames have mainly focused on a single-column-removal scenario. However, the collapse of the Federal Building in the US due to car bomb explosion indicated that the loss of multiple columns may occur in the real structures, wherein the structures are more vulnerable to collapse. Meanwhile, the General Services Administration (GSA) in the US suggested that the removal of side columns of the structure has a great possibility to cause collapse. Therefore, this paper analytically deals with the robustness of 3-D steel frames in a two-side-column-removal (TSCR) scenario. Analytical method is first proposed to determine the collapse resistance of the frame during this column-removal procedure. The reliability of the analytical method is verified by the finite element results. Moreover, a design-based methodology is proposed to quickly assess the robustness of the frame due to a TSCR scenario. It is found the analytical method can reasonably predict the resistance-displacement relationship of the frame in the TSCR scenario, with an error generally less than 10%. The parametric numerical analyses suggest that the slab thickness mainly affects the plastic bearing capacity of the frame. The rebar diameter mainly affects the capacity of the frame at large displacement. However, the steel beam section height affects both the plastic and ultimate bearing capacity of the frame. A case study on a six-storey steel frame shows that the design-based methodology provides a conservative prediction on the robustness of the frame.

• Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.369-375
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• 2010

Ti-6Al-4V ELI alloy, which is commonly used as a biomaterial, is associated with a high elastic modulus and poor biocompatibility. This alloy presents a variety of problems on several areas. Therefore, the development of good non-toxic biocompatible biomaterials with a low elastic modulus is necessary. Particularly, hydroxyapatite (HA) is an attractive material for human tissue implantation. This material is widely used as artificial bone due to its good biocompatibility and similar composition to human bone. Many scientists have studied the fabrication of HA as a biomaterial. However, applications of bulk HA compact are hindered by the low strength of HA when it is sintered. Therefore, HA has been coated on Ti or Ti alloy to facilitate good bonding between tissue and the HA surface. However, there are many problems when doing this, such as the low bonding strength between HA and Ti due to the different thermal expansion coefficients and mechanical properties. In this study, a Ti-HA composite with a porous surface was successfully fabricated by pulse current activated sintering (PCAS) and a subsequent leaching process.

• Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
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• v.47 no.8
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• pp.508-515
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• 2009

Ti-6Al-4V biomaterial is widely used as a bone alternative. However, Ti-6Al-4V ELI alloy suffers from numerous problems such as a high elastic modulus and high toxicity. Therefore, non-toxic biomaterials with low elastic moduli need to be developed. Ti-HA(hydroxyapatite) composites were fabricated in the present work by pulsed current activated sintering (PCAS) at $1000^{\circ}C$ under 60 MPa using mixed Ti and HA powders. The effects of HA content on the physical and mechanical properties of the sintered Ti-HA composites have been investigated. X-ray diffraction(XRD) analysis of the Ti-HA composites, including Ti-40 wt%HA in particular, revealed new phases, $Ti_{2}O$, CaO, $CaTiO_3$, and TixPy, formed by chemical reactions between Ti and HA during sintering. The hardness of the Ti-HA composites decreased with an increase in HA content. The corrosion resistance of these composites was observed to be an excellent candidate as a commercial Ti-6Al-4 V ELI alloy. A Ti-5 wt%HA composite fabricated by PCAS is recommended as a new biomaterial, because it offers good corrosion resistance, compressive strength, wear resistance, and biocompatibility, and a low Young's modulus.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.399-413
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• 2020

The numerical simulation of liquid sloshing in the three-dimensional tanks under horizontal excitation and roll excitation was carried out, and the inhibition effect of different baffles on the sloshing phenomenon was investigated. The numerical calculations were carried out by the nonlinear Boundary Element Method (BEM) with Green's theorem based on the potential flow, which was conducted with the governing equation corresponding to the boundaries of each region. The validity of the method was verified by comparing with experimental values and published literatures. The horizontal baffle, the vertical baffle and the T-shaped baffle in the sloshing tanks were investigated respectively, and the baffles' position, dimension and the liquid depth were provided and discussed in detail. It is drawn that the baffle shape plays a non-negligible role in the tank sloshing. The vertical baffle is a more effective way to reduce the sloshing amplitude when the tank is under a horizontal harmonic excitation while the horizontal baffle is a more effective way when the tank is under a roll excitation. The amplitude of free surface elevation at right tank wall decreases with the increasing of the horizontal baffle length and the vertical baffle height. Although the T-shaped baffle has the best suppression effect on tank sloshing under horizontal excitation, it has limited suppression effect under roll excitation and will complicate the sloshing phenomenon when changing baffle height.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.241-263
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• 2022

The conventional wind and twisted-wind effect on aerodynamic properties of neighboring buildings arranged in side-by-side and tandem systems at 2B and 5B spacings are systematically investigated by large eddy simulation. Different physical interactions between different wind profiles and neighboring buildings will be deeply understood. The neighboring-building system under two different types of wind profiles, i.e., conventional wind profile (CWP), twisted wind profiles (TWP) with the maximum twisted angle of 30°, is used to evaluate the variation of physical mechanism between wind and buildings. Aerodynamic characteristics including mean and RMS pressure coefficient, and velocity field were systematically analyzed and compared between different scenario. It was found that the distribution of mean pressure, root-mean-square x velocity and the streamline of wind flow for TWP greatly deviated from CWP, and the effect of TWP on the downstream building, was drastically different from that of CWP, such as the size of vortexes after the lower stream building being bigger when exposed to TWP, and the mean pressure distribution on the building surfaces are also different. Moreover, evidence of buildings arranged in side-by-side and tandem configurations having interchangeable properties under TWP was also discovered, that two buildings being arranged side-by-side exposed to TWP could be identified as being arranged in tandem with a different wind twist angle, or vice versa.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.1350-1364
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• 2023

2D/1D coupling method is an important neutron transport calculation method due to its high accuracy and relatively low computation cost. However, 2D/1D coupling method may diverge especially in small axial mesh size. To analyze the convergence behavior of 2D/1D coupling method, a Fourier analysis for k-eigenvalue neutron transport problems is implemented. The analysis results present the divergence problem of 2D/1D coupling method in small axial mesh size. Several common attempts are made to solve the divergence problem, which are to increase the number of inner iterations of the 2D or 1D calculation, and two times 1D calculations per outer iteration. However, these attempts only could improve the convergence rate but cannot deal with the divergence problem of 2D/1D coupling method thoroughly. Moreover, the choice of axial solvers, such as DGFEM SN and traditional SN, and its effect on the convergence behavior are also discussed. The results show that the choice of axial solver is a key point for the convergence of 2D/1D method. The DGFEM SN based 2D/1D method could converge within a wide range of optical thickness region, which is superior to that of traditional SN method.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.9-21
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• 2023

The parameters of civil engineering structures have time-variant characteristics during their service. When extremely large external excitations, such as earthquake excitation to buildings or overweight vehicles to bridges, apply to structures, sudden or gradual damage may be caused. It is crucially necessary to detect the occurrence time and severity of the damage. The unscented Kalman filter (UKF), as one efficient estimator, is usually used to conduct the recursive identification of parameters. However, the conventional UKF algorithm has a weak tracking ability for time-variant structural parameters. To improve the identification ability of time-variant parameters, an adaptive UKF with forgetting factor (AUKF-FF) algorithm, in which the state covariance, innovation covariance and cross covariance are updated simultaneously with the help of the forgetting factor, is proposed. To verify the effectiveness of the method, this paper conducted two case studies as follows: the identification of time-variant parameters of a simply supported bridge when the vehicle passing, and the model updating of a six-story concrete frame structure with field test during the Yangbi earthquake excitation in Yunnan Province, China. The comparison results of the numerical studies show that the proposed method is superior to the conventional UKF algorithm for the time-variant parameter identification in convergence speed, accuracy and adaptability to the sampling frequency. The field test studies demonstrate that the proposed method can provide suggestions for solving practical problems.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.72.1-72.16
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• 2023

Background: Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) on the surface of Streptococcus dysgalactiae, coded with gapC, is a glycolytic enzyme that was reported to be a moonlighting protein and virulence factor. Objective: This study assessed GAPDH as a potential immunization candidate protein to prevent streptococcus infections. Methods: Mice were vaccinated subcutaneously with recombinant GAPDH and challenged with S. dysgalactiae in vivo. They were then evaluated using histological methods. rGAPDH of mouse bone marrow-derived dendritic cells (BMDCs) was evaluated using immunoblotting, reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay methods. Results: Vaccination with rGAPDH improved the survival rates and decreased the bacterial burdens in the mammary glands compared to the control group. The mechanism by which rGAPDH vaccination protects against S. dysgalactiae was investigated. In vitro experiments showed that rGAPDH boosted the generation of interleukin-10 and tumor necrosis factor-α. Treatment of BMDCs with TAK-242, a toll-like receptor 4 inhibitor, or C29, a toll-like receptor 2 inhibitor, reduced cytokines substantially, suggesting that rGAPDH may be a potential ligand for both TLR2 and TLR4. Subsequent investigations showed that rGAPDH may activate the phosphorylation of MAPKs and nuclear factor-κB. Conclusions: GAPDH is a promising immunization candidate protein for targeting virulence and enhancing immune-mediated protection. Further investigations are warranted to understand the mechanisms underlying the activation of BMDCs by rGAPDH in a TLR2- and TLR4-dependent manner and the regulation of inflammatory cytokines contributing to mastitis pathogenesis.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.319-338
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• 2023

The study presents a new hybrid data-driven method by combining radial basis functions neural networks (RBF-NN) with the Jaya algorithm (JA) to provide effective structural health monitoring of arch dams. The novelty of this approach lies in that only one user-defined parameter is required and thus can increase its effectiveness and efficiency, as compared to other machine learning techniques that often require processing a large amount of training and testing model parameters and hyper-parameters, with high time-consuming. This approach seeks rapid damage detection in arch dams under dynamic conditions, to prevent potential disasters, by utilizing the RBF-NNN to seamlessly integrate the dynamic elastic modulus (DEM) and modal parameters (such as natural frequency and mode shape) as damage indicators. To determine the dynamic characteristics of the arch dam, the JA sequentially optimizes an objective function rooted in vibration-based data sets. Two case studies of hyperbolic concrete arch dams were carefully designed using finite element simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the RBF-NN model, in conjunction with the Jaya algorithm. The testing results demonstrated that the proposed methods could exhibit significant computational time-savings, while effectively detecting damage in arch dam structures with complex nonlinearities. Furthermore, despite training data contaminated with a high level of noise, the RBF-NN and JA fusion remained the robustness, with high accuracy.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.90 no.1
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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.