• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.2A
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• pp.293-300
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• 2006

There is a high degree of uncertainty in measurements of the thickness or the loss of thickness of corroded elements. Generally the thickness of corroded elements varies from one location of the element to another depending on the degree of corrosion, which makes the safety assessment difficult. Therefore, a procedure for safety assessment of corrosion- damaged steel structures using an imprecise reliability is proposed in this paper. The proposed safety assessment procedure using the imprecise reliability was also applied to a cable-stayed bridge in Korea to demonstrate its effectiveness and applicability. Since there is a large variation in measurements of the thickness of corroded elements, the thickness of corroded elements was considered as the imprecise element. This variation was found to be directly related to the degree of corrosion. Therefore, the variation increases as the degree of corrosion increases. Based on the comparative observations between the conventional reliability and the imprecise reliability, it is suggested that the imprecise reliability analysis derived based on the subjective or statistical judgment of conditional independence could be successfully utilized for the risk or safety assessment of corrosion-damaged structures.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.9 no.1 s.41
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• pp.51-59
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• 2005

Magnetorheological(MR) dampers are one of the most promising semi active control devices, because they have advantages such as small power requirement, reliability, and low price to manufacture. To reduce the responses of structures with MR dampers, a control system including power supply, controller, and sensors is required. However, when a mount of MR dampers are used to a large?scale civil structure such as cable stayed bridges, the control system becomes complex. Therefore, it is not easy to install and maintain the MR damper based control system. To resolve above difficulties, This paper proposes a smart passive system that consists of a MR damper and an electromagnetic induction(EMI) system. According to the Faraday’s law of induction, EMI system that is attached to the MR damper produces electric energy. The produced energy is supplied to the MR damper. Thus, the MR damper with EMI system does not require any power at all. Furthermore, the induced electric energy is proportional to external loads like earthquakes, which means the MR damper with EMI system is adaptable to external loads without any controller and corresponding sensors. Therefore, it is easy to build up and maintain the proposed smart passive system.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.31-38
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• 2002

This study attempts to grasp the correlation between the image of bridges and bridge landscapes with their surroundings during day and nighttime viewing, and to understand the psychological influence of nighttime lighting through quantitative analysis. In addition, it presents a design to construct bridges in order to increase viewers enjoyment of bridge landscapes lit at night. To attain this objective and contrive generalization of the results, this paper selects 8 of 9 bridges with lightings in Seoul and excludes bridges constructed by 2004. The criteria for selection of the viewpoints is that each must be within easy reach of bridges, and must allow viewers to recognize surrounding landscape details both in daylight and at night. As well, the pictures of bridges are taken in the terraced land by the riverside. The study selects 16 pictures, judged to be of similar quality and angle, to establish the conditions of luminosity, color, definition and angle. The results are as follows. First, viewers preferences of night landscapes are higher than day landscapes due to the effect of lighting. By day, viewers preferred bridges with various structures such as cable-stayed bridges and arch bridges more than simple bridges like girder bridges. Viewers also indicated preferences for lightings which feature a unique color and which are harmonized with their surroundings. Second, components representing the images of bridge landscape are classified into three types, 'beauty', 'system' and 'agreeableness'. Third, the factors affecting preference are the shape of bridge by day and lighting at night. Esthetic appeal is the most important factor in visual preference so each bridges own esthetic appeal and surroundings must be considered. Thus, a complete plan must be created which considers safety, beauty and the local surroundings. In addition, when the lighting of a bridge is selected, the design of the bridge landscape must consider various lighting schemes to harmonize the upper and lower parts of the structure. At this point, the study reveals the basic elements of bridge planning in order to increase appreciation of the bridge landscape.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.211-234
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• 2016

Super long-span bridges provide people with great convenience, but they also bring traffic safety problems caused by strong wind owing to their high decks. In this paper, the large eddy simulation together with dynamic mesh technology in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to explore the mechanism of a moving vehicle's transient aerodynamic force in crosswind, the regularity and mechanism of the vehicle's aerodynamic forces when it passes through a bridge tower's wake zone in crosswind. By comparing the calculated results and those from wind tunnel tests, the reliability of the methods used in the paper is verified on a moving vehicle's aerodynamic forces in a bridge tower's wake region. A vehicle's aerodynamic force coefficient decreases sharply when it enters into the wake region, and reaches its minimum on the leeward of the bridge tower where exists a backflow region. When a vehicle moves on the outermost lane on the windward direction and just passes through the backflow region, it will suffer from negative lateral aerodynamic force and yaw moment in the bridge tower's wake zone. And the vehicle's passing ruins the original vortex structure there, resulting in that the lateral wind on the right side of the bridge tower does not change its direction but directly impact on the vehicle's windward. So when the vehicle leaves from the backflow region, it will suffer stronger aerodynamic than that borne by the vehicle when it just enters into the region. Other cases of vehicle moving on different lane and different directions were also discussed thoroughly. The results show that the vehicle's pneumatic safety performance is evidently better than that of a vehicle on the outermost lane on the windward.

• International journal of steel structures
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1191-1199
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• 2018

Concepts of submerged floating tunnels (SFTs) for land connection have been continuously suggested and developed by several researchers and institutes. To maintain their predefined positions under various dynamic environmental loading conditions, the submerged floating tunnels should be effectively moored by reasonable mooring systems. With rational mooring systems, the design of SFTs should be confirmed to satisfy the structural safety, fatigue, and operability design criteria related to tunnel motion, internal forces, structural stresses, and the fatigue life of the main structural members. This paper presents a feasibility study of a submerged floating tunnel moored by an inclined tendon system. The basic structural concept was developed based on the concept of conventional cable-stayed bridges to minimize the seabed excavation, penetration, and anchoring work by applying tower-inclined tendon systems instead of conventional tendons with individual seabed anchors. To evaluate the structural performance of the new type of SFT, a hydrodynamic analysis was performed in the time domain using the commercial nonlinear finite element code ABAQUS-AQUA. For the main dynamic environmental loading condition, an irregular wave load was examined. A JONSWAP wave spectrum was used to generate a time-series wave-induced hydrodynamic load considering the specific significant wave height and peak period for predetermined wave conditions. By performing a time-domain hydrodynamic analysis on the submerged floating structure under irregular waves, the motional characteristics, structural stresses, and fatigue damage of the floating tunnel and mooring members were analyzed to evaluate the structural safety and fatigue performance. According to the analytical study, the suggested conceptual model for SFTs shows very good hydrodynamic structural performance. It can be concluded that the concept can be considered as a reasonable structural type of SFT.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.57-68
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• 2023

Bridge hangers, such as those in suspension and cable-stayed bridges, suffer from cumulative fatigue damage caused by dynamic loads (e.g., cyclic traffic and wind loads) in their service condition. Thus, the identification of damage to hangers is important in preserving the service life of the bridge structure. This study develops a new method for condition assessment of bridge hangers. The tension force of the bridge and the damages in the element level can be identified using the Bayesian optimization method. To improve the number of observed data, the additional mass method is combined the Bayesian optimization method. Numerical studies are presented to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. The influence of different acquisition functions, which include expected improvement (EI), probability-of-improvement (PI), lower confidence bound (LCB), and expected improvement per second (EIPC), on the identification of damage to the bridge hanger is studied. Results show that the errors identified by the EI acquisition function are smaller than those identified by the other acquisition functions. The identification of the damage to the bridge hanger with various types of boundary conditions and different levels of measurement noise are also studied. Results show that both the severity of the damage and the tension force can be identified via the proposed method, thereby verifying the robustness of the proposed method. Compared to the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and nonlinear least-square method (NLS), the Bayesian optimization (BO) performs best in identifying the structural damage and tension force.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.117-126
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• 2008

In this paper, it is presented a digital image processing method and the program (Visual C++) to determine the shape of the suspension bridge. To investigate the precision of this method, a suspension bridge is divided into 5, 13 and 19 images, respectively, by using the 6.3M pixels digital camera with 300mm zoom lens. Obtained results of the Kwang-Ahn Grand Bridge by using this method are fairly close to the real precision surveyed data. The accuracy is more improved by increasing the number of divided images of the structure. The total cost, man power and time of field survey by this method presented in this study could be much more reduced and the developed program could be applied with little modification for other structures like cable-stayed bridges, if lens compensation algorithms and program access capabilities are improved.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.65-74
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• 2012

This paper aimed at the development of a unified wireless control system in order to control various forms of vibration of bridges. This unified wireless control system unified all different systems each of which functioned for difference purpose such as measurement, analysis, judgement, and control of data acquired from the movement of structure. It was designed to control structures with feedback which was returned according to each different situation after analyzing various signals measured about the structure. In this system, every information in each step from measurement to control was wirelessly transmitted to its central system so that a manager was able to effectively monitor the whole process. Just for the case when any system control need to intervene occurred, a graph user interface was designed for better access. In order to evaluate its basic performance, an experiment was carried out to see how signal input and output were done by comparing its results with those of a wired system. On the basis of the experiment, a vibration control experiment was performed on a model of cable-stayed bridge to see if the unified wireless control system worked well in realtime. This was carried out under four conditions, and the graph and quantitative result under each condition were compared each other. All experiments proved that the unified wireless control system functioned as well as the wired one in terms of its basic performance and vibration control.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.619-628
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• 2009

To predict the time-dependent behavior of concrete structures, the models which describe the time-dependent characteristics of concrete, i.e. creep and shrinkage are required. However, there must be significant differences between the displacements that are obtained using the given creep and shrinkage models and the measured displacements, because of the uncertainties of creep and shrinkage model itself and those of environmental condition. There are some efforts to reduce these error or uncertainties by using the model which are obtained from creep test for the concrete in construction site. Nevertheless, the predicted values from this model may be still different from the actual values due to the same reason. This study aimed to propose a method of estimating the creep coefficient from the measured displacements of concrete structure, where creep model uncertainty factor was considered as an error factor of creep model. Numerical validation for double composite steel box and concrete beam showed desirable feasibility of the presented method. Consideration of the time-dependent characteristics of creep as one of the error factors make it possible to predict long-term behaviors of concrete structures more realistically, especially long-span PSC girder bridges and concrete cable-stayed bridges of which major problem is the geometry control under construction and maintenance.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2009.09a
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• pp.133-144
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• 2009

Incheon Bridge, 18.4 km long sea-crossing bridge, will be opened to the traffic in October 2009 and this will be the new landmark of the gearing up north-east Asia as well as the largest & longest bridge of Korea. Incheon Bridge is the integrated set of several special featured bridges including a magnificent cable-stayed girder bridge which has a main span of 800 m width to cross the navigation channel in and out of the Port of Incheon. Incheon Bridge is making an epoch of long-span bridge designs thanks to the fully application of the AASHTO LRFD (load & resistance factor design) to both the superstructures and the substructures. A state-of-the-art of the geotechnologies which were applied to the Incheon Bridge construction project is introduced. The most Large-diameter drilled shafts were penetrated into the bedrock to support the colossal superstructures. The bearing capacity and deformational characteristics of the foundations were verified through the world's largest static pile load test. 8 full-scale pilot piles were tested in both offshore site and onshore area prior to the commencement of constructions. Compressible load beyond 30,000 tonf pressed a single 3 m diameter foundation pile by means of bi-directional loading method including the Osterberg cell techniques. Detailed site investigation to characterize the subsurface properties had been carried out. Geotextile tubes, tied sheet pile walls, and trestles were utilized to overcome the very large tidal difference between ebb and flow at the foreshore site. 44 circular-cell type dolphins surround the piers near the navigation channel to protect the bridge against the collision with aberrant vessels. Each dolphin structure consists of the flat sheet piled wall and infilled aggregates to absorb the collision impact. Geo-centrifugal tests were performed to evaluate the behavior of the dolphin in the seabed and to verify the numerical model for the design. Rip-rap embankments on the seabed are expected to prevent the scouring of the foundation. Prefabricated vertical drains, sand compaction piles, deep cement mixings, horizontal natural-fiber drains, and other subsidiary methods were used to improve the soft ground for the site of abutments, toll plazas, and access roads. Light-weight backfill using EPS blocks helps to reduce the earth pressure behind the abutment on the soft ground. Some kinds of reinforced earth like as MSE using geosynthetics were utilized for the ring wall of the abutment. Soil steel bridges made of corrugated steel plates and engineered backfills were constructed for the open-cut tunnel and the culvert. Diverse experiences of advanced designs and constructions from the Incheon Bridge project have been propagated by relevant engineers and it is strongly expected that significant achievements in geotechnical engineering through this project will contribute to the national development of the longspan bridge technologies remarkably.