• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.789-810
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• 2016

Reinforced concrete (RC) bridges with both skew and curvature are pretty common in areas with complex terrains. Existing studies have shown skewed and/or curved bridges exhibit more complicated seismic performance than straight bridges, and yet related seismic risk studies are still rare. These bridges deserve more studies in low-to-moderate seismic regions than those in seismic-prone areas. This is because for bridges with irregular and complex geometric designs, comprehensive seismic analysis is not always required and little knowledge about actual seismic risks for these bridges in low-to-moderate regions is available. To provide more insightful understanding of the seismic risks and the impact from the geometric configurations, analytical fragility studies are carried out on four typical bridge designs with different geometric configurations (i.e., straight, curved, skewed, skewed and curved) in the mountain west region of the United States. The results show the curved and skewed geometries can considerably affect the bridge seismic fragility in a complex manner, underscoring the importance of conducting detailed seismic risk assessment of skewed and curved bridges in low-to-moderate seismic regions.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.5 no.5
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• pp.553-570
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• 2013

Using of masonry infill as partitions, in flat slab frame buildings is a common practice in many parts of the world. The infill is, generally, not considered in the design and the buildings are designed as bare frames. More of fundamental information in the effect of masomary infill on the seismic performance of RC building frames is in great demand for structural engineers. Therefore the main aim of this research is to evaluate the seismic performance of such buildings without (bare frame) and with various systems of the masonary infill. For this purpose, thirteen three dimensional models are chosen and analyzed by SAP2000 program. In this study the stress strain relation model proposed by Crisafulli for the hysteric behaviour of masonary subjected to cyclic loading is used. The results show that the nonstructural masonary infill can impart significant increase global strength and stiffness of such building frames and can enhance the seismic behaviour of flat slab frame building to large extent depending on infill wall system. As a result great deal of insight has been obtained on seismic response of such flat slab buildings which enable the structural engineer to determine the optimum position of infill wall between the columns.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.181-199
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• 2014

The infill walls, whose contribution to the earthquake resistance of a structure is generally ignored due to their limited lateral rigidities, constitute a part of the lateral load bearing system of an RC frame structure. A common method for improving the earthquake behavior of RC frame structures is increasing the contribution of the infill walls to the overall lateral rigidity by strengthening them through different techniques. The present study investigates the influence of externally bonded perforated steel plates on the load capacities, rigidities, and ductilities of hollow brick infill walls. For this purpose, a reference (unstrengthened) and twelve strengthened specimens were subjected to monotonic diagonal compression. The experiments indicated that the spacing of the bolts, connecting the plates to the wall, have a more profound effect on the behavior of a brick wall compared to the thickness of the strengthening plates. Furthermore, an increase in the plate thickness was shown to result in a considerable improvement in the behavior of the wall only if the plates are connected to the wall with closely-spaced bolts. This strengthening technique was found to increase the energy absorption capacities of the walls between 4 and 14 times the capacity of the reference wall. The strengthened walls reached ultimate loads 30-160% greater than the reference wall and all strengthened walls remained intact till the end of the test.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.719-734
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• 2018

Prior to the introduction of modern seismic guidelines, it was a common practice to provide straight bar anchorage for beam bottom reinforcement of gravity load designed building. Exterior joints with straight bar anchorages for beam bottom reinforcements are susceptible to sudden anchorage failure under load reversals and hence require systematic seismic upgradation. Hence in the present study, an attempt is made to upgrade exterior beam-column sub-assemblage of a three storied gravity load designed (GLD) building with single steel haunch. Analytical formulations are presented for evaluating the haunch forces in single steel haunch retrofit. Influence of parameters that affect the efficacy and effectiveness of the single haunch retrofit are also discussed. The effectiveness of the single haunch retrofit for enhancing seismic performance of GLD beam-column specimen is evaluated through experimental investigation under reverse cyclic loading. The single steel haunch retrofit had succeeded in preventing the anchorage failure of beam bottom bars of GLD specimen, delaying the joint shear damage and partially directing the damage towards the beam. A remarkable improvement in the load carrying capacity of the upgraded GLD beam-column sub-assemblage is observed. Further, a tremendous improvement in the energy dissipation of about 2.63 times that of GLD specimen is observed in the case of upgraded GLD specimen. The study also underlines the efficacy of single steel haunch retrofit for seismic upgradation of deficient GLD structures.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.197-207
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• 2013

The seismic performance of school buildings has been a matter of common interest socially and academically. The structural system of the school buildings is representative of the domestic low-rise reinforced concrete moment resisting frames, which apply extensively infills in their masonry walls. The masonry infilled walls are divided into full masonry infill in the transverse direction and partial masonry infill in the longitudinal direction. The masonry infilled walls are usually not included in structural analysis during the design process, but affect significantly the seismic performance because they behave with surrounding frames simultaneously during earthquakes. Many researchers have studied the effect of the masonry infilled walls, but several issues have been missed such as the increase of asymmetry by adding the full masonry infill, the size of the mean strength of the full masonry infill, and short column effect by the partial masonry infill. The issues were analytically investigated and the results showed that they should be checked at least by nonlinear pushover analysis in the seismic performance evaluation process. The results also confirm the weakness of the guideline of Korean Educational Development Institute where the seismic performance is basically assessed without structural analysis.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.104-110
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• 2012

It is a common practice to design basement walls acting as a one-way slab or plate with idealized boundary conditions, resulting in potentially inefficient design. The walls are often supported by buttress columns and side walls in the vertical direction, thereby acting as a two-way slab. In this study, structural behavior of single-story, three-span basement wall subjected to lateral soil pressure was investigated. Three dimensional finite element analyses were conducted to determine the force distribution on the wall. Based on the numerical studies, a regression analysis was carried out to determine the design values of moments in vertical and horizontal directions as well as shear forces on the wall and design charts are developed. The proposed design method with accompanying design charts would enable practicing engineers to estimate member forces on the wall for preliminary design purpose without resorting to finite element analysis. Numerical examples demonstrated the applicability of the proposed method.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.473-494
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• 2014

Progressive collapse, which is referred to as the collapse of the entire building under local damages, is a common failure mode happened by earthquakes. The collapse process highly depends on the whole structural system. Since, asymmetry of the building plan leads to the local damage concentration; it may intensify the progressive collapse mechanism of asymmetric buildings. In this research the progressive collapse of regular and irregular 6-story RC ordinary moment resisting frame buildings are studied in the presence of the earthquake loads. Collapse process and collapse propagation are investigated using nonlinear time history analyses (NLTHA) in buildings with 5%, 15% and 25% mass asymmetry with respect to the number of collapsed hinges and story drifts criteria. Results show that increasing the value of mass eccentricity makes the asymmetric buildings become unstable earlier and in the early stages with lower number of the collapsed hinges. So, with increasing the mass eccentricity in building, instability and collapse of the entire building occurs earlier, with lower potential of the progressive collapse. It is also demonstrated that with increasing the mass asymmetry the decreasing trend of the number of collapsed beam and column hinges is approximately similar to the decreasing trend in the average story drifts of the mass centers and stiff edges. So, as an alternative to a much difficult-to-calculate local response parameter of the number of collapsed hinges, the story drift, as a global response parameter, measures the potential of progressive collapse more easily.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.69 no.2
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• pp.155-162
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• 2019

It is very common to find an empirical formulation in an earthquake design code to calculate fundamental vibration period of a structural system. Fundamental vibration period or frequency is a key parameter to provide adequate information pertinent to dynamic characteristics and performance assessment of a structure. This parameter enables to assess seismic demand of a structure. It is possible to find an empirical formulation related to reinforced concrete structures, masonry towers and slender masonry structures. Calculated natural vibration frequencies suggested by empirical formulation in the literatures has not suits in a high accuracy to the case of rest of the historical masonry bridges due to different construction techniques and wide variety of material properties. For the listed reasons, estimation of fundamental frequency gets harder. This paper aims to present an empirical formulation through Mean Square Error study to find ambient vibration frequency of historical masonry bridges by using a non-linear regression model. For this purpose, a series of data collected from literature especially focused on the finite element models of historical masonry bridges modelled in a full scale to get first global natural frequency, unit weight and elasticity modulus of used dominant material based on homogenization approach, length, height and width of the masonry bridge and main span length were considered to predict natural vibration frequency. An empirical formulation is proposed with 81% accuracy. Also, this study draw attention that this accuracy decreases to 35%, if the modulus of elasticity and unit weight are ignored.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.435-445
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• 2019

The collapses of curved bridges are mainly caused by the damaged columns, subjected to the combined loadings of axial load, shear force, flexural moment and torsional moment, under earthquakes. However, these combined loadings have not been fully investigated. This paper firstly investigated the mechanical characteristics of the bending-torsion coupling effects, based on the seismic response spectrum analysis of 24 curved bridge models. And then 9 reinforced concrete (RC) and circular column specimens were tested, by changing the bending-tortion ratio (M/T), axial compression ratio, longitudinal reinforcement ratio and spiral reinforcement ratio, respectively. The results show that the bending-torsion coupling effects of piers are more significant, along with the decrease of girder curvature and the increase of pier height. The M/T ratio ranges from 6 to 15 for common cases, and influences the crack distribution, plastic zone and hysteretic curve of piers. And these seismic characteristics are also influenced by the compression ratio, longitudinal reinforcement ratio and spiral reinforcement ratios of piers.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.309-318
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• 2004

This research automatically designed psc-box girder bridges by using an optimum design program and applied the results to the various types of bridges to verify if common facts used in steel bridges or concrete bridges can be applied to PSC bridges. Namely, it investigated appropriate unequal span length division by comparing with bridge of unequal and equal span length division, and verified the influence of the load factors which are changed by time or specification applying the results to various types of bridge. and it applied reinforced concrete bridge and steel bridge's variable girder depth which is slender and effective to save material costs to PSC box girder bridges. Technical solution of optimum design program used SUMT procedure, and Kavlie's extended penalty function to allow infeasible design points in the process. Powell's direct method was used for searching design points and a gradient's approximate method was used to reduce the design time.