• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.73 no.1
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• pp.53-64
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• 2020

In different high seismic regions around the world, many non-ductile existing reinforced concrete frame buildings, built without adequate seismic detailing requirements, have been damaged or collapsed after past earthquakes. The assessment and the retrofit of these non-ductile concrete structures is crucial theme of research for all the scientific community of engineers. In particular, a careful assessment of the existing building is fundamental for understanding the failure mechanisms that govern the collapse of the structure or the achievement of the recommended limit states. Based on the seismic assessment, the best retrofit strategy can be designed and applied to the structure. A school building located in Avellino province (Italy) is the case study. The analysis of seismic vulnerability carried out on the mentioned building has highlighted deficiencies in both static and seismic load conditions. The retrofit of the building has been designed based on different retrofit options in order to show the real retrofit design developed from the engineers to achieve the seismic safety of the building. The retrofit costs associated to structural operations are calculated for each case and have been summed up to the costs of the in situ tests. The paper shows a real retrofit design case study in which the best solution is chosen based on the results in terms of structural performance and cost among the different retrofit options.

• Coupled systems mechanics
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.433-454
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• 2020

In-place analysis for offshore platforms is essentially required to make proper design for new structures and true assessment for existing structures. The structural integrity of platform components under the maximum and minimum operating loads of environmental conditions is required for risk assessment and inspection plan development. In-place analyses have been executed to check that the structural member with all appurtenances robustness and capability to support the applied loads in either storm condition or operating condition. A nonlinear finite element analysis is adopted for the platform structure above the seabed and the pile-soil interaction to estimate the in-place behavior of a typical fixed offshore platform. The analysis includes interpretation of dynamic design parameters based on the available site-specific data, together with foundation design recommendations for in-place loading conditions. The SACS software is utilized to calculate the natural frequencies of the model and to obtain the response of platform joints according to in-place analysis then the stresses at selected members, as well as their nodal displacements. The directions of environmental loads and water depth variations have important effects on the results of the in-place analysis behavior. The result shows that the in-place analysis is quite crucial for safe design and operation of offshore platform and assessment for existing offshore structures.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.16 no.5 s.72
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• pp.543-553
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• 2004

This paper covered two related subjects: the use of the inverse modal perturbation technique to assess structural damage in existing structures; and the use of a seismic capacity evaluation to assess damaged structures, with the aid of the identified structural damage. The substructural identification and the Tikhonov regularization algorithm were incorporated for efficient damage assessment of complex and large frame structures. The seismic capacity of a damaged structure was evaluated by comparing the structure's seismic responses and seismic damage indices. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been investigated through the numerical simulation study for a twenty-story frame structure with undamaged and damaged cases, and also different earthquake excitations.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.511-539
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• 2015

The main objective of this study is to analytically investigate the effectiveness of different strengthening solutions in upgrading the seismic performance of existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Nepal. For this, four building models with different structural configurations and detailing were considered. Three possible rehabilitation solutions were studied, namely: (a) RC shear wall, (b) steel bracing, and (c) RC jacketing for all of the studied buildings. A numerical analysis was conducted with adaptive pushover and dynamic time history analysis. Seismic performance enhancement of the studied buildings was evaluated in terms of demand capacity ratio of the RC elements, capacity curve, inter-storey drift, energy dissipation capacity and moment curvature demand of the structures. Finally, the seismic safety assessment was performed based on standard drift limits, showing that retrofitting solutions significantly improved the seismic performance of existing buildings in Nepal.

• Computational Structural Engineering
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.107-115
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• 1993

This study is directed for the development of a computer aided safety assessment system for agricultural irrigation structures. The developed system is composed of four subsystems that incorporate database, structural analysis, safety assessment, and postprocess, which are made to be interfaced systematically. It is developed in the user-friendly menu driving form with pull-down type interaction on a personal computer. The main algorithm for safety assessment of deteriorated structures utilizes a rational rating system based on the reliability method. From this study, it may be stated that the proposed rating and safety assessment system provide an effective tool and thus it can be widely used in practice for the assessment of safety and load carrying capacity of existing deteriorated or damaged agricultural irrigation structures.

• Magazine of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.47-50
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• 2012

• Journal of the Korean Society for Advanced Composite Structures
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.15-20
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• 2014

This study carried out passenger safety assessment by real car crash simulation of composite post structures for road facilities. The effects of different material properties of composites for various parameters are studied using the LS-DYNA finite element program for this study. In this study, the existing finite element analysis of steel post structures using the LS-DYNA program is further extended to study dynamic behaviors of the structures made of various composite materials. The numerical results for various parameters are verified by comparing different models with displacements and stress distribution occurred in the post and car.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.893-910
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• 2015

Earthquake safety of existing buildings has gained considerable importance after earthquakes which have occurred in our country especially in the last 30 years. Performance based assessment methods have been widely used for existing reinforced concrete structures. This study aims to investigate the earthquake performances of the building stock located in Van Lake basin in Eastern Anatolia of Turkey. The case study of buildings has been modeled on and the structural performances have been determined by employing the non-linear methods described in the latest Turkish Earthquake Code published in 2007. The Van lake basin is located on the very seismically active in a region. On October 23, 2011, a magnitude of Mw 7.2 earthquake struck the Van province in eastern Turkey. The earthquake ground motion was recorded as about 0.1g in Bitlis province. Performance evaluations have been performed by taking samples from each district consisting urban building stocks of Bitlis. A total of 16 reinforced concrete buildings have been evaluated. Among them, 53% of those buildings were determined in the Fully Operational performance level; 13% of them in the Life Safety performance and 34% of them could not be evaluated because of the ratio of the effective mass of first mode to the total mass of the buildings was smaller than 0.70. Therefore, incremental equivalent seismic load methods, which are a part of Turkish Earthquake Code -2007, cannot be used.

• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2011

Similarity assessment of a CAD model is one of important issues from the aspect of model re-using. In real practice, many new mechanical parts are designed by modifying existing ones. The reuse of part enables to save design time and efforts for the designers. Design time would be further reduced if there were an efficient way to search for existing similar designs. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm of similarity assessment for mechanical part model with design history embedded within the CAD model. Since it is possible to retrieve the design history and detailed-feature information using CAD API, we can obtain an accurate and reliable assessment result. For our purpose, our assessment algorithm can be divided by two: (1) we select suitable parts by comparing MSG (Model Signature Graph) extracted from a base feature of the required model; (2) detailed-features' similarities are assessed with their own attributes and reference structures. In addition, we also propose a indexing method for managing a model database in the last part of this article.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.205-213
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• 2001

The condition assessment of bridges is one of the important procedures in the safety evaluation of the structures. The current inspection guideline is rather ambiguous and vague so that the inspection results based on the existing guidelines are highly subjective and varing from person to person and even day to day for a given person. It is therefore, necessary to improve the current inspection criteria in order to provide consistent results in safety assessment. To circumvent possible inconsistencies in inspection and rating of bridge components, the revised criteria have been proposed in this study. The proposed guideline and criteria may be efficiently used for the realistic and consistent assessment of bridge structures.