• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.71 no.6
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• pp.699-712
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• 2019

The reinforced concrete lining of hydraulic pressure tunnels tends to crack under high inner water pressure (IWP), which results in the inner water exosmosis along cracks and involves typical hydro-mechanical interaction. This study aims at the development, validation and application of an indirect-coupled method to simulate the lining cracking process. Based on the concrete damage plasticity (CDP) model, the utility routine GETVRM and the user subroutine USDFLD in the finite element code ABAQUS is employed to calculate and adjust the secondary hydraulic conductivity according to the material damage and the plastic volume strain. The friction-contact method (FCM) is introduced to track the lining-rock interface behavior. Compared with the traditional node-shared method (NSM) model, the FCM model is more feasible to simulate the lining cracking process. The number of cracks and the reinforcement stress can be significantly reduced, which matches well with the observed results in engineering practices. Moreover, the damage evolution of reinforced concrete lining can be effectively slowed down. This numerical method provides an insight into the cracking process of reinforced concrete lining in hydraulic pressure tunnels.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.329-340
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• 2019

An innovated type of the flat steel plate-lightweight aggregate concrete hollow composite slab was presented in this paper. This kind of the slab is composed of flat steel plate and the lightweight aggregate concrete slab, which were interfaced with a set of perfobond shear connectors (PBL shear connectors) with circular hollow structural sections (CHSS) and the shear stud connectors. Five specimens were tested under static monotonic loading. In the test, the influence of shear span/height ratios and arrangements of CHSS on bending capacity and flexural rigidity of the composite slabs were investigated. Based on the test results, the crack patterns, failure modes, the bending moment-curvature curves as well as the strains of the flat steel plate and the concrete were focused and analyzed. The test results showed that the flat steel plate was fully connected to the lightweight aggregate concrete slab and no obvious slippage was observed between the steel plate and the concrete, and the composite slabs performed well in terms of bending capacity, flexural rigidity and ductility. It was further shown that all of the specimens failed in bending failure mode regardless of the shear span/height ratios and the arrangement of CHSS. Moreover, the plane-section assumption was proved to be valid, and the calculated formulas for predicting the bending capacity and the flexural rigidity of the composite slabs were proposed on the basis of the experimental results.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.463-476
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• 2021

The concept of using Steel-concrete (SC) composite walls as retaining walls has recently been introduced by the authors and their effectiveness of resisting out-of-plane loads has also been demonstrated. In this paper, an improved analytical formulation based on partial interaction theory, which has previously been developed by the authors, is presented. The improved formulation considers a new loading condition and also accounts for cracking in concrete to simulate the real conditions. Due to a limited number of test specimens, further finite element (FE)simulations are performed in order to verify the analytical procedure in more detail. It is observed that the results from the improved analytical procedure are in excellent agreement with both experimental and numerical results. Moreover, a detailed parametric study is conducted using the developed FE model to investigate effects of different parameters, such as distance between shear connectors, shear connector length, concrete strength, steel plate thickness, concrete cover thickness, wall's width to thickness ratio, and wall's height to thickness ratio, on the behavior of SC composite walls subjected to out-of-plane loads.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.201-211
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• 2021

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety in Korea developed seismic fragility function for various building types in 2009. Damage states for most building types were determined by structural analyses of sample models and foreign references because actual cases damaged by earthquakes rarely exist in Korea. Low-rise, piloti-type buildings showed severe damage by brittle failure in columns due to insufficient stirrup details in the 2017 Pohang earthquake. Therefore, it is necessary to improve damage state criteria for piloti-type buildings by consulting actual outcomes from the earthquake. An analytical approach was conducted by developing analysis models of sample buildings reflecting insufficient stirrup details of columns to accomplish the purpose. The result showed that current spectral displacements of damage states for piloti-type buildings might be too large to estimate actual fragility. When the brittle behavior observed in the earthquake is reflected in the analysis model, one-fourth through one-sixth of current spectral displacements of damage states may be appropriate for existing low-rise, piloti-type buildings.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.2
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• pp.259-272
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• 2022

The branch of electronics that uses an organic solar cell or conductive organic polymers in order to yield electricity from sunlight is called photovoltaic. Regarding this crucial issue, an artificial intelligence-based predictor is presented to investigate the vibrational behavior of the organic solar cell. In addition, the generalized differential quadrature method (GDQM) is utilized to extract the results. The validation examination is done to confirm the credibility of the results. Then, the deep neural network with fully connected layers (DNN-FCL) is trained by means of Adam optimization on the dataset whose members are the vibration response of the design-points. By determining the optimum values for the biases along with weights of DNN-FCL, one can predict the vibrational characteristics of any organic solar cell by knowing the properties defined as the inputs of the mentioned DNN. To assess the ability of the proposed artificial intelligence-based model in prediction of the vibrational response of the organic solar cell, the authors monitored the mean squared error in different steps of the training the DNN-FCL and they observed that the convergency of the results is excellent.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.487-495
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• 2021

The use of prestressed concrete box girder bridges built by segmentally balanced cantilevers has bloomed in the last decades due to its significant structural and construction advantages in complex topographies. In Colombia, this typology is the most common solution for structures with spans ranging of 80-200 m. Despite its popularity, excessive deflections in bridges worldwide evidenced that time-dependent effects were underestimated. This problem has led to the constant updating of the creep and shrinkage models in international code standards. Differences observed between design processes of box girder bridges of the Colombian code and Eurocode, led to the need for a validation of in-service status of these structures. This study analyzes the long-term behavior of the Tablazo bridge with data scarcity. The measured leveling of this structure is compared with a finite-element model that consider the most widely used creep and shrinkage models in the literature. Finally, an adjusted model evidence excessive deflection on the bridge after six years. Monitoring of this bridge typology in Colombia and updating of the current design code is recommended.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.229-235
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• 2023

An all-perovskite oxide heterostructure composed of SrSnO₃/Nb-doped SrTiO₃ was fabricated using the pulsed laser deposition method. In-plane and out-of-plane structural characterization of the fabricated films were analyzed by x-ray diffraction with θ-2θ scans and φ scans. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurement was performed to check the film's composition. The electrical transport characteristic of the heterostructure was determined by applying a pulsed dc bias across the interface. Unusual transport properties of the interface between the SrSnO₃ and Nb-doped SrTiO₃ were investigated at temperatures from 100 to 300 K. A diodelike rectifying behavior was observed in the temperature-dependent current-voltage (IV) measurements. The forward current showed the typical IV characteristics of p-n junctions or Schottky diodes, and were perfectly fitted using the thermionic emission model. Two regions with different transport mechanism were detected, and the boundary curve was expressed by ln I = -1.28V - 13. Under reverse bias, however, the temperature- dependent IV curves revealed an unusual increase in the reverse-bias current with decreasing temperature, indicating tunneling effects at the interface. The Poole-Frenkel emission was used to explain this electrical transport mechanism under the reverse voltages.

• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.10-13
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• 2023

To confirm the room-temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure as claimed in recent arXiv preprints by Lee et al., we followed the original authors' systematic solid-state synthesis recipe to reproduce Cu-doped Pb-apatite, known as LK-99. Using X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, we identified inclusion of various impurities alongside the apatite phase in our sample. While the sample exhibited an overall semiconducting behavior in electrical transport, an intriguing resistivity anomaly at 380 K was observed, possibly originating from a structural phase transition of the Cu_2-δS impurity. Based on the transport and magnetization measurements, we conclude that the sample is a non-magnetic semiconductor, with absence of superconductivity.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.88 no.3
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• pp.239-249
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• 2023

The Radial Point Interpolation Method (RPIM) has been proposed to overcome the difficulties associated with the use of the Radial Basis Functions (RBFs). The RPIM has the following properties: Simple implementation in terms of boundary conditions as in the Finite Element Method (FEM). A less expensive CPU time compared to other collocation meshless methods such as the Moving Least Square (MLS) collocation method. In this work, we propose an adaptive high-order numerical algorithm based on RPIM to simulate the thermoviscoplastic behavior of a material mixing observed in the Friction Stir Welding (FSW) process. The proposed adaptive meshfree RPIM algorithm adapts well to the geometric and physical data by choosing a good shape parameter with a good precision. Our numerical approach combines the RPIM and the Asymptotic Numerical Method (ANM). A numerical procedure is also proposed in this work to automatically determine an improved shape parameter for the RBFs. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is analyzed in comparison with an iterative algorithm.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.89 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2024

Ratcheting is the cyclic buildup of inelastic strain on a structure resulting from a combination of primary and secondary cyclic stress. It can lead to excessive plastic deformation, incremental collapse, or fatigue. Ratcheting has been numerically investigated on a cantilever beam, considering the current study's primary and secondary bending loads. In addition, the effect of input frequency on the onset of ratcheting has been investigated. The non-linear dynamic elastic-plastic approach has been utilized. Analogous to Yamashita's bending-bending ratchet diagram, a non-dimensional ratchet diagram with a frequency effect is proposed. The result presents that the secondary stress values fall sequentially with the increase of primary stress values. Moreover, a displacement amplification factor graph is also established to explain the effect of frequency on ratchet occurrence conditions. In terms of frequency effect, it has been observed that the lower frequency (0.25 times the natural frequency) was more detrimental for ratchet occurrence conditions than the higher frequency (2 times the natural frequency) due to the effect of dynamic displacement. Finally, the effect of material modeling of ratcheting behavior on a beam is shown using different hardening coefficients of kinematic hardening material modeling.