• Proceedings of the SAREK Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.142-147
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• 2009

In the present study, a numerical simulation of passenger evacuation in a subway station was performed. Algorithm for passenger flow analysis based on DEM(Discrete Element Method) has been improved to simulate passenger flow in detailed geometry. The effect of grid density was assessed in the present study to show the advantage of using finer grid in the simulation. The method of coupling passenger flow and fire simulation has also been investigated to analyze passenger evacuation flow under fire. In this method the CO distributions in the subway station was used to assess fire hazards of passenger by means of FED(Fractional Effective Dose) model. Using the coupled algorithm a simulation for passenger evacuation flow and fire analysis were performed simultaneously in the simplified subway station. This algorithm could be used in the design of subway station for the purpose of passengers' safety in case of fire.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.59 no.3
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• pp.539-558
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• 2016

Minarets are almost the inevitable part of Mosques in Islam and according to some, from a philosophical point of view, today they symbolize the spiritual elevation of man towards God. Due to slenderness, minarets are susceptible to earthquakes and wind loads. They are mostly built in a masonry style by using cut limestone blocks or occasionally by using bricks. In this study, one minaret (M1 Minaret) of one of the charmest mosques of Turkey, Sultan Ahmed Mosque, popularly known as Blue Mosque, built between 1609 and 1616 on the order of Sultan Ahmed by the architect Mehmet Agha is investigated under some registered earthquake loads. According to historical records, a great earthquake hit Istanbul and/or its close proximity approximately every 250 years. Ottomans tackled with the problem of building earthquake resistant, slender minarets by starting to use forged iron connectors with lead as a filler to fix them to the upper and lower and to adjacent stones instead of using traditional mortar only. Thus, the discrete stones are able to transfer tensile forces in some sense. This study investigates the contribution of lead to the energy absorption capacity of the minaret under extensive earthquakes occurred in the region. By using the software ANSYS/LS-DYNA in modelling and investigating the minaret nonlinearly, it is found out that under very big recorded earthquakes, the connectors of vertical cast iron-lead mechanism play very important role and help to keep the structure safe.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.45-55
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• 2018

The arched stone bridge has been continuously deteriorated and damaged by the weathering and corrosion over time, and also natural disaster such as earthquake has added the damage. However, masonry stone bridge has the behavior characteristics as discontinuum structure and is very vulnerable to lateral load such as earthquake. So, it is necessary to analyze the dynamic behavior characteristics according to various design variables of arched stone bridge under seismic loads. To this end, the arched stone bridge can be classified according to arch types, and then the discrete element method is applied for the structural modelling and analysis. In addition, seismic loads according to return periods are generated and the dynamic analysis considering the discontinuity characteristics is carried out. Finally, the dynamic behavior characteristics are evaluated through the structural safety estimation for slip condition.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.639-655
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• 2016

The effect of particle breakage and intermediate principal stress ratio on the behaviour of crushable granular assemblies under true triaxial stress conditions is studied using the discrete element method. Numerical results show that the increase of intermediate principal stress ratio $b(b=({\sigma}_2-{\sigma}_3)/({\sigma}_1-{\sigma}_3))$ results in the increase of dilatancy at low confining pressures but the decrease of dilatancy at high confining pressures, which stems from the distinct increasing compaction caused by breakage with b. The influence of b on the evolution of the peak apparent friction angle is also weakened by particle breakage. For low relative breakage, the relationship between the peak apparent friction angle and b is close to the Lade-Duncan failure model, whereas it conforms to the Matsuoka-Nakai failure model for high relative breakage. In addition, the increasing tendency of relative breakage, calculated based on a fractal particle size distribution with the fractal dimension being 2.5, declines with the increasing confining pressure and axial strain, which implies the existence of an ultimate graduation. Finally, the relationship between particle breakage and plastic work is found to conform to a unique hyperbolic correlation regardless of the test conditions.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.66 no.3
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• pp.379-386
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• 2018

The present study addresses the direct and indirect methods of determining the mode-I fracture toughness of concrete using experimental tests and particle flow code. The direct method used is compaction tensile test and the indirect methods are notched Brazilian disc test, semi-circular bend specimen test, and hollow center cracked disc. The experiments were carried out to determine which indirect method yields the fracture toughness closer to the one obtained by the direct method. In the numerical analysis, the PFC model was first calibrated with respect to the data obtained from the Brazilian laboratory test. The crack paths observed in the simulated tests were in reasonable accordance with experimental results. The discrete element simulations demonstrated that the macro fractures in the models are caused by microscopic tensile breakages on large numbers of bonded particles. The mode-I fracture toughness in the direct tensile test was smaller than the indirect testing results. The fracture toughness obtained from the SCB test was closer to the direct test results. Hence, the semi-circular bend test is recommended as a proper experiment for determination of mode-I fracture toughness of concrete in the absence of direct tests.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.509-514
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• 2010

A numerical simulation of passenger evacuation in a subway station was performed by coupling the passenger flow analysis and the fire simulation. The algorithm of the passenger flow analysis was based on a DEM (Discrete Element Method) using the potential map of the direction vector for each passenger. This algorithm was improved in the present study as to use finer grid smaller than a passenger in order to resolve detailed geometry of the station and to resolve the behavior of passengers in the bottleneck at the ticket gate considering the collision of passengers to a wall or with other passengers. In the fire simulation, the CO distribution predicted by using CFD was used to take into account the effect of toxic gases on the passengers' mobility. The methodology proposed in the present study could be used in designing safer subway station in case of fire occurrence.

• Geotechnical Engineering
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.49-62
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• 1995

Soil nailing has been widely rosed during the last two decades to stabilize sheep excavated slopes in several countries. In thin study, the discrete element method has been applied to evaluate the stability of the reiuorced slope. This method is capable of not only estimat ins tensile and sheer stresses mobilized in nails but also providing individual safety factors of soil and nails, It has been assumed that the nailed slope be comprised of slices connected with elastoplastic twinkler springs. A reasonable mechanism is applied for representing the behavior between nails and adj scent soils. Taking into account for the bequence of construction the developed method well predicts the measured tensile forces developed in nails so that it is possible to appropriately evaluate the overall safety factor.

• Journal of Powder Materials
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.300-304
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• 2020

In this paper, a durability study is presented to enhance the mechanical properties of an Fe-Si-Al powder-based magnetic core, through the addition of graphite. The compressive properties of Fe-Si-Al-graphite powder mixtures are explored using discrete element method (DEM), and a powder compaction experiment is performed under identical conditions to verify the reliability of the DEM analysis. Important parameters for powder compaction of Fe-Si-Al-graphite powder mixtures are identified. The compressibility of the powders is observed to increase as the amount of graphite mixture increases and as the size of the graphite powders decreases. In addition, the compaction properties of the Fe-Si-Al-graphite powder mixtures are further explored by analyzing the transmissibility of stress between the top and bottom punches as well as the distribution of the compressive force. The application of graphite powders is confirmed to result in improved stress transmission and compressive force distribution, by 24% and 51%, respectively.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.2 no.5
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• pp.345-366
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• 2005

This work presents an assessment of the computational performance of a vector-parallel implementation of probabilistic model for concrete cracking in 3D. This paper shows the continuing efforts towards code optimization as reported in earlier works Paz, et al. (2002a,b and 2003). The probabilistic crack approach is based on the direct Monte Carlo method. Cracking is accounted by means of 3D interface elements. This approach considers that all nonlinearities are restricted to interface elements modeling cracks. The heterogeneity governs the overall cracking behavior and related size effects on concrete fracture. Computational kernels in the implementation are the inexact Newton iterative driver to solve the non-linear problem and a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) driver to solve linearized equations, using an element by element (EBE) strategy to compute matrix-vector products. In particular the paper analyzes code behavior using OpenMP directives in parallel vector processors (PVP), such as the CRAY SV1 and CRAY T94. The impact of the memory architecture on code performance, and also some strategies devised to circumvent this issue are addressed by numerical experiment.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.495-521
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• 2016

Ancient monuments of Greek and Roman classical architecture usually consist of multi-drum columns that are constructed of stone blocks placed on top of each other. Several research studies deal with the seismic behaviour of such structures, since earthquakes are common causes of destruction of such monuments. This paper investigates the effect of multiple earthquakes on the seismic performance of multi-drum columns, through numerical simulations and parametric analyses. The Discrete Element Method and an appropriate contact model have been implemented in a specially developed software application that is able to efficiently perform the necessary simulations in two dimensions. Specifically, various strong ground excitations are used in series for the computation of the collective final deformation of multi-drum columns. In order to calculate this cumulative deformation for a series of ground motions, the individual deformation of the column for each excitation is computed and then used as initial conditions for the next earthquake excitation. Various multi-drum columns with different dimensions are also considered in the analyses in order to examine how the geometric characteristics of columns can affect their seismic sequence behaviour, in combination with the excitation frequency content.