• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.465-479
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• 2021

One of the important causes of building and infrastructure failure, such as bridges on pile foundations, is the placement of the piles in liquefiable soil that can become unstable under seismic loads. Therefore, the overarching aim of this study is to investigate the seismic behavior of a soil-pile system in liquefiable soil using three-dimensional numerical FEM analysis, including soil-pile interaction. Effective parameters on concrete pile response, involving the pile diameter, pile length, soil type, and base acceleration, were considered in the framework of finite element non-linear dynamic analysis. The constitutive model of soil was considered as elasto-plastic kinematic-isotropic hardening. First, the finite element model was verified by comparing the variations on the pile response with the measured data from the centrifuge tests, and there was a strong agreement between the numerical and experimental results. Totally 64 non-linear time-history analyses were conducted, and the responses were investigated in terms of the lateral displacement of the pile, the effect of the base acceleration in the pile behavior, the bending moment distribution in the pile body, and the pore pressure. The numerical analysis results demonstrated that the relationship between the pile lateral displacement and the maximum base acceleration is non-linear. Furthermore, increasing the pile diameter results in an increase in the passive pressure of the soil. Also, piles with small and big diameters are subjected to yielding under bending and shear states, respectively. It is concluded that an effective stress-based ground response analysis should be conducted when there is a liquefaction condition in order to determine the maximum bending moment and shear force generated within the pile.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.365-381
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• 2023

The existing vision-based techniques for inspection and condition assessment of civil infrastructure are mostly manual and consequently time-consuming, expensive, subjective, and risky. As a viable alternative, researchers in the past resorted to deep learning-based autonomous damage detection algorithms for expedited post-disaster reconnaissance of structures. Although a number of automatic damage detection algorithms have been proposed, the scarcity of labeled training data remains a major concern. To address this issue, this study proposed a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on consistency regularization and cross-supervision. Image data from post-earthquake reconnaissance, that contains cracks, spalling, and exposed rebars are used to evaluate the proposed solution. Experiments are carried out under different data partition protocols, and it is shown that the proposed SSL method can make use of unlabeled images to enhance the segmentation performance when limited amount of ground truth labels are provided. This study also proposes DeepLab-AASPP and modified versions of U-Net++ based on channel-wise attention mechanism to better segment the components and damage areas from images of reinforced concrete buildings. The channel-wise attention mechanism can effectively improve the performance of the network by dynamically scaling the feature maps so that the networks can focus on more informative feature maps in the concatenation layer. The proposed DeepLab-AASPP achieves the best performance on component segmentation and damage state segmentation tasks with mIoU scores of 0.9850 and 0.7032, respectively. For crack, spalling, and rebar segmentation tasks, modified U-Net++ obtains the best performance with Igou scores (excluding the background pixels) of 0.5449, 0.9375, and 0.5018, respectively. The proposed architectures win the second place in IC-SHM2021 competition in all five tasks of Project 2.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.37-47
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• 2023

A new clamped mechanical splice system was proposed to develop structural performance and constructability for precast concrete connections. The proposed mechanical splice resists external loading immediately after the engagement. The mechanical splices applicable for both large-scale rebars for plants and small-scale rebars for buildings were developed with the same design concept. Quasi-static lateral cyclic loading tests were conducted with reinforced and precast concrete members to verify the seismic performance. Also, shaking table tests with three types of seismic wave excitation, 1) random wave with white noise, 2) the 2016 Gyeongju earthquake, and 3) the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake, were conducted to confirm the dynamic performance. All tests were performed with real-scale concrete specimens. Sensors measured the lateral load, acceleration, displacement, crack pattern, and secant system stiffness, and energy dissipation was determined by lateral load-displacement relation. As a result, the precast specimen provided the emulative performance with RC. In the shaking table tests, PC frames' maximum acceleration and displacement response were amplified 1.57 - 2.85 and 2.20 - 2.92 times compared to the ground motions. The precast specimens utilizing clamped mechanical splice showed ductile behavior with energy dissipation capacity against strong motion earthquakes.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.13-21
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• 2006

Geosynthetic damage has attracted a major attention since the introduction of geotextiles for civil engineering applications. In this study 3 pilot trial embankments were carried out to investigate the behaviours of reinforced embankments over soft cohesive soils and to find the optimum methodology of embankments over soft soils. As the seamed part of polyester mat (PET, tensile strength 15 ton) used in the first full-scale field test was ruptured under progressing rotational slope failure because of unexpectedly rapid construction of embankments, the excessive pore water pressures were measured. On the soil behavior where tension explosion of mat was continued, pore pressure larger than the one caused by embankment height was measured. Especially, at the depth of 5.0 m under the ground pore pressure increased over long term. It was discussed with respect to the height of embankment and heaving behavior of soft soils.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.26 no.11
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• pp.111-123
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• 2010

The steel pipe of steel-concrete composite drilled shafts increases the pile strength and induces the ductile failure by constraining the deformation of the inner concrete. In this research, pile loading tests were performed to analyze the field applicability of a steel-concrete composite drilled shafts. The test ground consisted of 5~7 m thick soil underlying rock mass. The test piles consisted of two steel-concrete composite drilled shafts, which were the concrete filled steel pipe piles with the diameter of 0.508 m, and a concrete pile with the same diameter. The test results showed that the boundary between the upper steel composite section and the lower concrete section was structurally weak and needs to be reinforced by using a inner steel cage. If the boundary is located in deep depth, which is not influenced by lateral load, the allowable strength of the lower concrete section increases, so an economical design can be performed by increasing the design load of steel-concrete composite drilled shafts.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.503-515
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• 2022

This paper presents the development of seismic fragility curves for a precast reinforced concrete bridge instrumented with a structural health monitoring (SHM) system. The bridge is located near an active seismic fault in the Dominican Republic (DR) and provides the only access to several local communities in the aftermath of a potential damaging earthquake; moreover, the sample bridge was designed with outdated building codes and uses structural detailing not adequate for structures in seismic regions. The bridge was instrumented with an SHM system to extract information about its state of structural integrity and estimate its seismic performance. The data obtained from the SHM system is integrated with structural models to develop a set of fragility curves to be used as a quantitative measure of the expected damage; the fragility curves provide an estimate of the probability that the structure will exceed different damage limit states as a function of an earthquake intensity measure. To obtain the fragility curves a digital twin of the bridge is developed combining a computational finite element model and the information extracted from the SHM system. The digital twin is used as a response prediction tool that minimizes modeling uncertainty, significantly improving the predicting capability of the model and the accuracy of the fragility curves. The digital twin was used to perform a nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) with selected ground motions that are consistent with the seismic fault and site characteristics. The fragility curves show that for the maximum expected acceleration (with a 2% probability of exceedance in 50 years) the structure has a 62% probability of undergoing extensive damage. This is the first study presenting fragility curves for civil infrastructure in the DR and the proposed methodology can be extended to other structures to support disaster mitigation and post-disaster decision-making strategies.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.4C
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• pp.229-238
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• 2006

Observed field behaviors are frequently different from the behaviors predicted in the design state due to several uncertainties involved in soil properties, numerical modeling, and error of measuring system even though a sophisticated numerical analysis technique is applied to solve the consolidation behavior of drainage-installed soft deposits. In this study, genetic algorithms are applied to back-analyze the soil properties using the observed behavior of soft clay deposit composed of multi layers that shows complex consolidation characteristics. Utilizing the program, one might be able to appropriately predict the subsequent consolidation behavior from the measured data in an early stage of consolidation of multi layered soft deposits. Example analyses for drainage-installed multi-layered soft deposits are performed to examine the applicability of proposed back-analysis method.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.5C
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• pp.199-206
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• 2009

This paper presents full scale model tests on the various types of model piles carried out to estimate the behavior of laterally loaded steel-concrete composite piles. Subgrade-reaction spring system was developed to simulate the reaction of ground in laboratory condition. In addition, lateral behavior of piles under working load condition was estimated using composite loading system, which is available for independent loading in vertical and horizontal direction. Steel-concrete composite piles showed higher efficiency in lateral resistance rather than drilled shaft made of reinforced concrete. The lateral resistance of composite pile was larger than the summation of steel pile and concrete pile due to the composite effect by steel casing. The effect of shear key or strength of concrete on the behavior of composite pile was examined. The substitution of reinforcing bar by steel casing was also investigated.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.419-425
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• 2009

Recently, the number of shallow tunnel construction increases to improve the structural safety and environment-friendliness. In Semi-Cut and Cover Method, ground is excavated to the crown arch level and braced rib arch is set to backfill before the excavation of lower face. Semi-Cut and Cover Method is proposed to solve the problems occurred by the conventional Cut and Cover Method, such as unstability, high-cost and the large cutting slope to be reinforced. In this paper, the behaviors of Braced Rib Arch in shallow tunnel excavated by semi-cut and cover method was studied. Model tests in 1:10 Scale were performed in real construction sequences. The distance between supports of rib arch was 1.8 m and the length of spacer was 1.0 m. the size of test pit was 4.0 m (width)$\times$3.3 m (length) 4.0 m (height) in dimension. Tests results show that backfill load acting on arch was smaller than that in the conventional Open-Cut Method.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.85-92
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• 2024

This study presents code-compliant seismic details by addressing dry mechanical splices for precast concrete (PC) beam-column connections in the ACI 318-19 code. To this end, critical observations of previous test results on precast beam-column connection specimens with the proposed seismic detail are briefly reported in this study, along with a typical reinforced concrete (RC) monolithic connection. On this basis, nonlinear dynamic models were developed to verify seismic responses of the PC emulative moment-resisting frame systems. As the current design code allows only the emulative design approach, this study aims at identifying the seismic performances of PC moment frame systems depending on their emulative levels, for which two extreme cases were intentionally chosen as the non-emulative (unbonded self-centering with marginal energy dissipation) and fully-emulative connection details. Their corresponding hysteresis models were set by using commercial finite element analysis software. According to the current seismic design provisions, a typical five-story building was designed as a target PC building. Subsequently, nonlinear dynamic time history analyses were performed with seven ground motions to investigate the impact of emulation level or hysteresis models (i.e., energy dissipation performance) on system responses between the emulative and non-emulative PC moment frames. The analytical results showed that both the base shear and story drift ratio were substantially reduced in the emulative system compared to that of the non-emulative one, and it indicates the importance of the code-compliant (i.e., emulative) connection details on the seismic performance of the precast building.