• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제45권5호
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• pp.655-676
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• 2013

In this study, strength reduction factors and inelastic displacement ratios are investigated for SDOF systems with period range of 0.1-3.0 s considering soil structure interaction for earthquake motions recorded on soft soil. The effect of stiffness degradation on strength reduction factors and inelastic displacement ratios is investigated. The modified-Clough model is used to represent structures that exhibit significant stiffness degradation when subjected to reverse cyclic loading and the elastoplastic model is used to represent non-degrading structures. The effect of negative strain - hardening on the inelastic displacement and strength of structures is also investigated. Soil structure interacting systems are modeled and analyzed with effective period, effective damping and effective ductility values differing from fixed-base case. For inelastic time history analyses, Newmark method for step by step time integration was adapted in an in-house computer program. New equations are proposed for strength reduction factor and inelastic displacement ratio of interacting system as a function of structural period($\tilde{T}$, T) ductility (${\mu}$) and period lengthening ratio ($\tilde{T}$/T).

• Wind and Structures
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• 제5권5호
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• pp.463-478
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• 2002

Lighting and traffic signal columns are mainly stressed by excitation due to natural, gusty wind. Such columns typically have a door opening about 60 cm above ground level for the connection of the buried cable with the column's electric system. When the columns around this notch are inadequately designed, vibrations due to gusty winds will produce considerable stress amplitudes in this area, which lead to fatigue cracks. To give a realistic basis for a reliable and economic design of lighting and traffic signal columns, a number of experimental and theoretical investigations have been made. The proposed design concept allows the life of such columns to be assessed with a satisfactory degree of accuracy.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제24권1호
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• pp.37-52
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• 2019

Despite its success and wide application, base isolation system has been challenged for its passive nature, i.e., incapable of working with versatile external loadings. This is particularly exaggerated during near-source earthquakes and earthquakes with dominate low-frequency components. To address this issue, many efforts have been explored, including active base isolation system and hybrid base isolation system (with added controllable damping). Active base isolation system requires extra energy input which is not economical and the power supply may not be available during earthquakes. Although with tunable energy dissipation ability, hybrid base isolation systems are not able to alter its fundamental natural frequency to cope with varying external loadings. This paper reports an overview of new adventure with aim to develop adaptive base isolation system with controllable stiffness (thus adaptive natural frequency). With assistance of the feedback control system and the use of smart material technology, the proposed smart base isolation system is able to realize real-time decoupling of external loading and hence provides effective seismic protection against different types of earthquakes.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제23권3호
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• pp.295-306
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• 2019

Shanghai Tower is a 632-meter super high-rise building located in an area with wind and active earthquake. A sophisticated structural health monitoring (SHM) system consisting of more than 400 sensors has been built to carry out a long-term monitoring for its operational safety. In this paper, a reduced-order model including 31 elements was generated from a full model of this super tall building. An iterative regularized matrix method was proposed to tune the system parameters, making the dynamic characteristic of the reduced-order model be consistent with those in the full model. The updating reduced-order model can be regarded as a benchmark model for further analysis. A long-term monitoring for structural dynamic characteristics of Shanghai Tower under different construction stages was also investigated. The identified results, including natural frequency and damping ratio, were discussed. Based on the data collected from the SHM system, the dynamic characteristics of the whole structure was investigated. Compared with the result of the finite element model, a good agreement can be observed. The result provides a valuable reference for examining the evolution of future dynamic characteristics of this super tall building.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제23권5호
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• pp.421-447
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• 2016

Wind-induced and earthquake-induced excitations on tall structures can be effectively controlled by Tuned Liquid Damper (TLD). This work presents a numerical simulation procedure to study the performance of tuned liquid tank- structure system through ${\sigma}$-transformation based fluid-structure coupled solver. For this, a 'C' based computational code is developed. Structural equations are coupled with fluid equations in order to achieve the transfer of sloshing forces to structure for damping. Structural equations are solved by fourth order Runge-Kutta method while fluid equations are solved using finite difference based sigma transformed algorithm. Code is validated with previously published results. The minimum displacement of structure is observed when the resonance condition of the coupled system is satisfied through proper tuning of TLD. Since real-time excitations are random in nature, the performance study of TLD under random excitation is also carried out in which the Bretschneider spectrum is used to generate the random input wave.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제17권3호
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• pp.245-262
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• 2013

The flow interaction between two identical neighboring twin square prisms in a staggered arrangement in an open terrain was investigated experimentally. The downwind prism was mounted on a rigid-aeroelastic setup in an open-terrain boundary layer flow to measure its acrosswind root-mean-square responses and aerodynamic damping ratios. By varying the relative location of the upwind prism and the Scruton number associated with the downwind prism, the acrosswind aeroelastic behavior of the downwind prism was analyzed and compared to that of an isolated one. Results showed that the acrosswind root-mean-square response of the downwind prism could be either suppressed or enhanced by the wake flow produced by the neighboring upwind prism. Besides the assessment of the wake effect of the downwind prism, finally, regressed relationships were presented to describe the variation of the aerodynamic damping ratio so as to predict its acrosswind fluctuating response numerically.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제10권6호
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• pp.557-572
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• 2012

This paper focuses on the vibration control of long-span reticulated steel structures under multi-dimensional earthquake excitation. The control system and strategy are constructed based on Magneto-Rheological (MR) dampers. The LQR and Hrovat controlling algorithm is adopted to determine optimal MR damping force, while the modified Bingham model (MBM) and inverse neural network (INN) is proposed to solve the real-time controlling current. Three typical long-span reticulated structural systems are detailedly analyzed, including the double-layer cylindrical reticulated shell, single-layer spherical reticulated shell, and cable suspended arch-truss structure. Results show that the proposed control strategy can reduce the displacement and acceleration effectively for three typical structural systems. The displacement control effect under the earthquake excitation with different PGA is similar, while for the cable suspended arch-truss, the acceleration control effect increase distinctly with the earthquake excitation intensity. Moreover, for the cable suspended arch-truss, the strand stress variation can also be effectively reduced by the MR dampers, which is very important for this kind of structure to ensure that the cable would not be destroyed or relaxed.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제18권1호
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• pp.93-115
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• 2016

A particle tuned mass damper (PTMD) system is the combination of a traditional tuned mass damper (TMD) and a particle damper (PD). This paper presents the results of an experimental and analytical study of the damping performance of a PTMD attached to the top of a benchmark model under wind load excitation. The length ratio of the test model is 1:200. The vibration reduction laws of the system were explored by changing some system parameters (including the particle material, total auxiliary mass ratio, the mass ratio between container and particles, the suspending length, and wind velocity). An appropriate analytical solution based on the concept of an equivalent single-unit impact damper is presented. Comparison between the experimental and analytical results shows that, with the proper use of the equivalent method, reasonably accurate estimates of the dynamic response of a primary system under wind load excitation can be obtained. The experimental and simulation results show the robustness of the new damper and indicate that the damping performance can be improved by controlling the particle density, increasing the amount of particles, and aggravating the impact of particles etc.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.425-445
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• 2015

Parametric identification of structures is one of the important aspects of structural health monitoring. Most of the techniques available in the literature have been proved to be effective for structures with small degree of freedoms. However, the problem becomes challenging when the structure system is large, such as bridge structures. Therefore, it is highly desirable to develop parametric identification methods that are applicable to complex structures. In this paper, the LSE based techniques will be combined with the substructure approach for identifying the parameters of a cable-stayed bridge with large degree of freedoms. Numerical analysis has been carried out for substructures extracted from the 2-dimentional (2D) finite element model of a cable-stayed bridge. Only vertical white noise excitations are applied to the structure, and two different cases are considered where the structural damping is not included or included. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of identifying the structural parameters with high accuracy without measurement noises.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.225-237
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• 2013

Excessive vibrations induced by earthquake excitation and wind load are an obstacle in design and construction of tall and super tall buildings. An innovative vibration control structure system (Mega-Sub Controlled Structure System-MSCSS) was recently proposed to further improve humans comfort and their safeties during natural disasters. Preliminary investigations were performed using a two dimensional equivalent simplified model, composed by 3 mega-stories. In this paper, a more reasonable and realistic scaled model is design to investigate the dynamical characteristics and controlling performances of this structure when subjected to strong earthquake motion. The control parameters of the structure system, such as the modulated sub-structures disposition; the damping coefficient ratio (RC); the stiffness ratio (RD); the mass ratio of the mega-structure and sub-structure (RM) are investigated and their optimal values (matched values) are obtained. The MSCSS is also compared with the so-called Mega-Sub Structure (MSS) regarding their displacement and acceleration responses when subjected to the same load conditions. Through the nonlinear time history analysis, the effectiveness and the feasibility of the proposed mega-sub controlled structure system (MSCSS) is demonstrated in reducing the displacement and acceleration responses and also improving human comfort under earthquake loads.