• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.37-66
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• 2019

In cold-formed steel structures, such as trusses, wall frames and portal frames, the use of back-to-back built-up cold-formed stainless-steel lipped channels as compression members are becoming increasingly popular. The advantages of using stainless-steel as structural members are corrosion resistance and durability, compared with carbon steel. The AISI/ASCE Standard, SEI/ASCE-8-02 and AS/NZS do not include the design of stainless-steel built-up channels and very few experimental tests or finite element analyses have been reported in the literature for such back-to back cold-formed stainless-steel channels. Current guidance by the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and the Australian and New Zealand (gAS/NZS) standards for built-up carbon steel sections only describe a modified slenderness approach, to consider the spacing of the intermediate fasteners. Thus, this paper presents a numerical investigation on the behavior of back-to-back cold-formed stainless-steel built-up lipped channels. Three different grades of stainless steel i.e., duplex EN1.4462, ferritic EN1.4003 and austenitic EN1.4404 have been considered. Effect of screw spacing on the axial strength of such built-up channels was investigated. As expected, most of the short and intermediate columns failed by either local-global or local-distortional buckling interactions, whereas the long columns, failed by global buckling. All three grades of stainless-steel stub columns failed by local buckling. A comprehensive parametric study was then carried out covering a wide range of slenderness and different cross-sectional geometries to assess the performance of the current design guidelines by AISI and AS/NZS. In total, 647 finite element models were analyzed. From the results of the parametric study, it was found that the AISI & AS/NZS are conservative by around 10 to 20% for cold-formed stainless-steel built-up lipped channels failed through overall buckling, irrespective of the stainless-steel grades. However, the AISI and AS/NZS can be un-conservative by around 6% for all three grades of stainless-steel built-up channels, which failed by local buckling.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.1115-1144
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• 2015

Current climate conditions along with advances in technology make further design and verification methods for structural strength and reliability of wind turbine towers imperative. Along with the growing interest for "green" energy, the wind energy sector has been developed tremendously the past decades. To this end, the improvement of wind turbine towers in terms of structural detailing and performance result in more efficient, durable and robust structures that facilitate their wider application, thus leading to energy harvesting increase. The wind tower industry is set to expand to greater heights than before and tapered steel towers with a circular cross-section are widely used as more capable of carrying heavier loads. The present study focuses on the improvement of the structural response of steel wind turbine towers, by means of internal stiffening. A thorough investigation of the contribution of stiffening rings to the overall structural behavior of the tower is being carried out. These stiffening rings are placed along the tower height to reduce local buckling phenomena, thus increasing the buckling strength of steel wind energy towers and leading the structure to a behavior closer to the one provided by the beam theory. Additionally to ring stiffeners, vertical stiffening schemes are studied to eliminate the presence of short wavelength buckles due to bending. For the purposes of this research, finite element analysis is applied in order to describe and predict in an accurate way the structural response of a model tower stiffened by internal stiffeners. Moreover, a parametric study is being performed in order to investigate the effect of the stiffeners' number to the functionality of the aforementioned stiffening systems and the improved structural behavior of the overall wind converter.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.1299-1319
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• 2015

This paper presents a detailed parametric study, conducted using finite element tools to cover a range of several geometric and material parameters, on the behaviour of thin-walled partially encased composite (PEC) columns. The PEC columns studied herein are composed of thin-walled built-up H-shaped steel sections with concrete infill cast between the flanges. Transverse links are provided between the opposing flanges to improve resistance to local buckling. The parametric study is confined to eccentrically-loaded columns subjected to major axis bending only. The parameters that were varied include the overall column slenderness ratio (L/d), load eccentricity ratio (e/d), link spacing-to-depth ratio (s/d), flange plate slenderness ratio (b/t) and concrete compressive strength ($f_{cu}$). The overall column slenderness ratio was chosen to be the primary variable with values of 5, 10 and 15. Other parameters were varied within each case of L/d ratio. The effects of the selected parameters on the behaviour of PEC columns were studied with respect to the failure mode, peak axial load, axial load versus average axial strain response, axial load versus lateral displacement response, moment versus lateral displacement behaviour and the axial load-moment interaction diagram. The results of the parametric study are presented in the paper and the influences of each of the parameters investigated are discussed.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.353-366
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• 2021

Cored moment resisting stub column (CMSC) was previously developed by the features of adopting a core segment which remains mostly elastic and reduced column section (RCS) details around the ends to from a stable hysteretic behavior with large post-yield stiffness and considerable ductility. Several full-scale CMSC components with various length proportions of the RCSs with respect to overall lengths have been experimentally investigated through both far-field and near-fault cyclic loadings followed by fatigue tests. Test results verified that the proposed CMSC provided very ductile hysteretic responses with no strength degradation even beyond the occurrence of the local buckling at the side-segments. The effect of RCS lengths on the seismic performance of the CMSC was verified to relate with the levels of the deformation concentration at the member ends, the local buckling behavior and overall ductility. Estimation equations were established to notionally calculate the first-yield and ultimate strengths of the CMSC and validated by the measured responses. A numerical model of the CMSC was developed to accurately capture the hysteretic performance of the specimens, and was adopted to clarify the effect of the surrounding frame and to perform a parametric study to develop the estimation of the elastic stiffness.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.81-88
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• 2014

Construction of vinyl house structures is increasing because they do not have a large cross section as non-permanent structures. Vinyl house structures are apt to collapse by snow load because they have a small size member as a temporary building. Therefore, it is very important to ensure not only the stiffness of the individual member, but also the overall stability of three-dimensional arch-type vinyl house structures. The purpose of this study is to estimate the stability of arch-type vinyl house structures that have a various curvature under the vertical load such as snow load. As a result of the study, the buckling load of V27 model is the largest, and the values of buckling load have a tendency to increase with increasing H(height of arch) in the case of $H{\leq}2.75m$, but to decrease with increasing H in the case of $H{\geq}2.75m$.

• Proceeding of KASS Symposium
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.58-65
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• 2006

The present study is concerned with the application of dynamic relaxation method in the investigation of the large deflection behavior of spatial structures. The dynamic relaxation do not require the computation or formulation of any tangent stiffness matrix. The convergence to the solution is achieved by using only vectorial quantities and no stiffness matrix is required in its overall assembled form. In an effort to evaluate the merits of the methods, extensive numerical studies were carried out on a number of selected structural systems. The advantages of using dynamic relaxation methods, in tracing the post-buckling behavior of spatial structures, are demonstrated.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.545-569
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• 2016

Stiffeners have widely been used in lateral load resisting systems to improve the buckling stability of shear panels in steel frames. However, due to major differences between plate girders and steel plate shear walls (SPSWs), use of plate girder equations often leads to uneconomical and, in some cases, incorrect design of stiffeners. Hence, this paper uses finite element analysis (FEA) to describe the effect of the rigidity and arrangement of stiffeners on the buckling behavior of plates. The procedures consider transverse and/or longitudinal stiffeners in various practical configurations. Subsequently, curves and formulas for the design of stiffeners are presented. In addition, the influence of stiffeners on the inward forces subjected to the boundary elements and the tension field angle is investigated as well. The results indicate that the effective application of stiffeners in SPSW systems not only improves the structural behavior, such as stiffness, overall strength and energy absorption, but also leads to a reduction of the forces that are exerted on the boundary elements.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.297-313
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• 2022

Composite steel plate shear wall (CSPSW) is a relatively novel structural system proposed to improve the performance of steel plate shear walls by adding one or two layers of concrete walls to the infill plate. In addition, the buckling of the infill steel plate has a significant negative effect on the shear strength and energy dissipation capacity of the overall systems. Accordingly, in this study, using the finite element (FE) method, the performance and behavior of composite steel shear walls using T-shaped stiffeners to prevent buckling of the infill steel plate and increase the capacity of CSPSW systems have been investigated. In this paper, after modeling composite steel plate shear walls with and without steel plates with finite element methods and calibration the models with experimental results, effects of parameters such as several stiffeners, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and a combination of T-shaped stiffeners located in the composite wall have been investigated on the ultimate capacity, web-plate buckling, von-Mises stress, and failure modes. The results showed that the arrangement of stiffeners has no significant effect on the capacity and performance of the CSPSW so that the use of vertical or horizontal stiffeners did not have a significant effect on the capacity and performance of the CSPSW. On the other hand, the use of diagonal hardeners has potentially affected the performance of CSPSWs, increasing the capacity of steel shear walls by up to 25%.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.175-182
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• 2005

The present study is concerned with the application of dynamic relaxation method in the investigation of the large deflection behavior of spatial structures. This numerical algorithm do not require the computation or formulation of any tangent stiffness matrix. The convergence to the solution is achieved by using only vectorial quantities and no stiffness matrix is required in its overall assembled form. In an effort to evaluate the merits of the methods, extensive numerical studies were carried out on a number of selected structural systems. The advantages of using dynamic relaxation methods, in tracing the post-buckling behavior of spatial structures, are demonstrated.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.301-304
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• 2006

Tower shell design is very important because tower takes about 20% of overall wind turbine cost. This paper contains procedure of tower analysis and optimization content. Some of requirements like eigenfreauency and buckling evaluated by numerical method, strength, are derived by analytic method. But strength and fatigue can be derived by mathematical method simply.