• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.10
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• pp.3855-3863
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• 2022

An evaluation of the radiation shielding performance of high-Z-particle-loaded polylactic acid (PLA) composite materials was pursued. Specimens were produced via fused deposition modeling (FDM) using copper-PLA, steel-PLA, and BaSO₄-PLA composite filaments containing 82.7, 75.2, and 44.6 wt% particulate phase contents, respectively, and were tested under broad-band flash x-ray conditions at the Sandia National Laboratories HERMES III facility. The experimental results for the mass attenuation coefficients of the composites were found to be in good agreement with GEANT4 simulations carried out using the same exposure conditions and an atomistic mixture as a model for the composite materials. Further simulation studies, focusing on the Cu-PLA composite system, were used to explore a shield design parameter space (in this case, defined by Cu-particle loading and shield areal density) to assess performance under both high-energy photon and electron fluxes over an incident energy range of 0.5-15 MeV. Based on these results, a method is proposed that can assist in the visualization and isolation of shield parameter coordinate sets that optimize performance under targeted radiation characteristics (type, energy). For electron flux shielding, an empirical relationship was found between areal density (AD), electron energy (E), composition and performance. In cases where ${\frac{E}{AD}}{\geq}2MeV{\bullet}cm{\bullet}g^{-1}$, a shield composed of >85 wt% Cu results in optimal performance. In contrast, a shield composed of <10 wt% Cu is anticipated to perform best against electron irradiation when ${\frac{E}{AD}}<2MeV{\bullet}cm{\bullet}g^{-1}$.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.427-446
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• 2022

Cutouts in the beams or plates are often unavoidable due to inspection, maintenance, ventilation, structural aesthetics purpose, and sometimes to lighten the structures. Therefore, there will be a substantial reduction in the strength of the structure due to the introduction of the cutouts. However, these cutouts can be reinforced with the different patterns of ribs (stiffener) to enhance the strength of the structure. The present study highlights the influence of the elliptical cutout reinforced with a different pattern of ribs on the stability performance of such stiffened composite panels subjected to non-uniform edge loads by employing the Finite element (FE) technique. In the present formulation, a 9-noded heterosis element is used to model the skin, and a 3-noded isoparametric beam element is used to simulate the rib that is attached around a cutout in different patterns. The displacement compatibility condition is employed between the plate and stiffener, and arbitrary orientations are taken care by introducing respective transformation matrices. The effect of shear deformation and rotary inertia are incorporated in the formulation. A new mesh configuration is developed to house the attached ribs around an elliptical cutout with different patterns. Initially, a study is performed on the panels with different stiffener schemes for various ply orientations and for different stiffener depth to width ratios (d_s/b_s) to determine an optimal stiffener configuration. Further, various parametric studies are conducted on an obtained optimal stiffened panel to understand the effect of cutout size, cutout orientation, panel aspect ratio, and boundary conditions. Finally, from the analysis, it can be observed that the arrangement of the stiffener attached to a panel has a major impact on the buckling capacity of the stiffened panel. The stiffener's depth to width ratio also significantly influences the buckling characteristic.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.581-601
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• 2022

The main objective of this research work is to investigate the free vibration behavior of annular sandwich plates resting on the Kerr foundation at thermal conditions. This sandwich configuration is composed of two FGM face sheets as coating layer and a porous GPLRC (GPL reinforced composite) core. It is supposed that the GPL nanofillers and the porosity coefficient vary continuously along the core thickness direction. To model closed-cell FG porous material reinforced with GPLs, Halpin-Tsai micromechanical modeling in conjunction with Gaussian-Random field scheme is used, while the Poisson's ratio and density are computed by the rule of mixtures. Besides, the material properties of two FGM face sheets change continuously through the thickness according to the power-law distribution. To capture fundamental frequencies of the annular sandwich plate resting on the Kerr foundation in a thermal environment, the analysis procedure is with the aid of Reddy's shear-deformation plate theory based high-order shear deformation plate theory (HSDT) to derive and solve the equations of motion and boundary conditions. The governing equations together with related boundary conditions are discretized using the generalized differential quadrature (GDQ) method in the spatial domain. Numerical results are compared with those published in the literature to examine the accuracy and validity of the present approach. A parametric solution for temperature variation across the thickness of the sandwich plate is employed taking into account the thermal conductivity, the inhomogeneity parameter, and the sandwich schemes. The numerical results indicate the influence of volume fraction index, GPLs volume fraction, porosity coefficient, three independent coefficients of Kerr elastic foundation, and temperature difference on the free vibration behavior of annular sandwich plate. This study provides essential information to engineers seeking innovative ways to promote composite structures in a practical way.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.24 no.8
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• pp.133-152
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• 2020

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to analyze the determinants of commodity trade in Korea and China and to examine the implications of China's GVC shift from export to domestic market on its impact on Korea's trade. Design/methodology - This study selected 30 major trading partner countries. The dependent variable is the trade volume, and the independent variables are general economic factors such as gross domestic product (GDP), GDP per capita, distance, and FTA. Findings - The trade pattern of Korea's commodities shows that GDP has a positive relationship with trade, import, and export. Distance has a significant negative relationship with total trade, import, and export. FTA is significant for import but it is not significant for total trade and export. The trade pattern of China's commodities shows that GDP has a significant positive relationship with total trade, import, and export. Distance has a negative relationship with trade, import, and export. GDP per capita is not significant for total trade and import, but it is significant for export. FTA is significant for total trade and export, but it is not significant for import. Originality/value - Existing papers were studied mainly in certain industrial sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, automobile industry and steel industry. This paper attempts to collects vast amounts of data about the 30 countries of Korea and China respectively and analyzes by Random Effect Model dividing the goods (0 to 9) in units of STIC (Rev. 4). The major contribution is that the decision factors affecting commodity trade can be analyzed in SITC units (0-9) to obtain analysis results that are subdivided by product group and organized by product.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.80 no.6
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• pp.701-709
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• 2021

The paper aims at improving the understanding and mitigating the effects of tunnel fires that may breakout due to the burning fuel and/or explosion within the tunnel. This study particularly focuses on the behavior of the commonly used horse shoe geometry of tunnel systems. The problem has been obtained using an adequate well-established program incorporating the Lagrangian approach. A transient-thermo-coupled static structural analysis is carried out. The effects of radiation and convection to the outer walls of the tunnel is studied. The paper also presents the impact of the hazard on the structural integrity of the tunnel. A methodology is proposed to study the tunnel fire using a model which uses equivalent steel sheet to represent the presence of reinforcements to improve the computational efficiency with adequate validation. A parametric study has been carried out and the effect of suitable lining property for mitigating the fire hazard is arrived at. Detailed analysis is done for the threshold limits of the properties of the lining material to check if it is acceptable in all aspects for the integrity of the tunnel. The study may prove useful for developing insights for ensuring tunnel fire safety. To conduct such studies experimentally are tremendously costly but are required to gain confidence. But, scaled models, as well as loading and testing conditions, cannot be studied by many trials experimentally as the cost will shoot up sharply. In this context, the results obtained from such computational studies with a feasible variation of various combinations of parameters may act as a set of guidelines to freeze the adequate combination of various parameters to conduct one or two costly experiments for confidence building.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.185-201
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• 2022

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is used to provide reliable information about the structure's integrity in near realtime following extreme incidents such as earthquakes, considering the inevitable aging and degradation that occurs in operating environments. This paper experimentally investigates an integrated wireless sensor network (Wi-SN) based monitoring technique for damage detection in concrete structures. An effective SHM technique can be used to detect potential structural damage based on post-earthquake data. Two novel methods are proposed for damage detection in reinforced concrete (RC) building structures including: (i) Jerk Energy Method (JEM), which is based on time-domain analysis, and (ii) Modal Contributing Parameter (MCP), which is based on frequency-domain analysis. Wireless accelerometer sensors are installed at each story level to monitor the dynamic responses from the building structure. Prior knowledge of the initial state (immediately after construction) of the structure is not required in these methods. Proposed methods only use responses recorded during ambient vibration state (i.e., operational state) to estimate the damage index. Herein, the experimental studies serve as an illustration of the procedures. In particular, (i) a 3-story shear-type steel frame model is analyzed for several damage scenarios and (ii) 2-story RC scaled down (at 1/6th) building models, simulated and verified under experimental tests on a shaking table. As a result, in addition to the usual benefits like system adaptability, and cost-effectiveness, the proposed sensing system does not require a cluster of sensors. The spatial information in the real-time recorded data is used in global damage identification stage of SHM. Whereas in next stage of SHM, the damage is detected at the story level. Experimental results also show the efficiency and superior performance of the proposed measuring techniques.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.311-321
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• 2021

Perception of the public to structural fires is very important because there are only a number of tall timber buildings constructed in the world. People are hesitating to accept tall timber buildings, so it is essential to ensure the first generation of tall timber buildings to a very high standard, especially fire safety. Right now, there are no specific design standards or regulations for fire design of tall timber buildings in Europe. Even though heavy timber members have better fire resistance than steel components, many conditions still need to be verified before considering the use of timber materials, e.g. fire spread, post-fire collapse, etc. This research numerically explores the structural behaviours of a tall Glulam building when one of its internal Glulam (Glued laminated timber) columns fails after sustaining a full 120-min standard fire and is removed from the established finite element building model created in SAP2000. The numerical results demonstrate that the failure and removal of the selected internal Glulam column may lead to the local failure of the adjacent CLT (Cross laminated timber) floor slabs, but will not lead to large disproportionate damage and collapse of the whole building. Here, the building is assumed to be located in Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.613-626
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• 2022

Guaranteeing the quality and integrity of structural health monitoring (SHM) data is very important for an effective assessment of structural condition. However, sensory system may malfunction due to sensor fault or harsh operational environment, resulting in multiple types of data anomaly existing in the measured data. Efficiently and automatically identifying anomalies from the vast amounts of measured data is significant for assessing the structural conditions and early warning for structural failure in SHM. The major challenges of current automated data anomaly detection methods are the imbalance of dataset categories. In terms of the feature of actual anomalous data, this paper proposes a data anomaly detection method based on data-level and deep learning technique for SHM of civil engineering structures. The proposed method consists of a data balancing phase to prepare a comprehensive training dataset based on data-level technique, and an anomaly detection phase based on a sophisticatedly designed network. The advanced densely connected convolutional network (DenseNet) and Transformer encoder are embedded in the specific network to facilitate extraction of both detail and global features of response data, and to establish the mapping between the highest level of abstractive features and data anomaly class. Numerical studies on a steel frame model are conducted to evaluate the performance and noise immunity of using the proposed network for data anomaly detection. The applicability of the proposed method for data anomaly classification is validated with the measured data of a practical supertall structure. The proposed method presents a remarkable performance on data anomaly detection, which reaches a 95.7% overall accuracy with practical engineering structural monitoring data, which demonstrates the effectiveness of data balancing and the robust classification capability of the proposed network.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.353-369
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• 2022

This study attempts to shed light on the coupled impact of types of loading, thickness stretching, and types of variation of Winkler-Pasternak foundations on the flexural behavior of simply- supported FG plates according to the new quasi-3D high order shear deformation theory, including integral terms. A new function sheep is used in the present work. In particular, both Winkler and Pasternak layers are non-uniform and vary along the plate length direction. In addition, the interaction between the loading type and the variation of Winkler-Pasternak foundation parameters is considered and involved in the governing equilibrium equations. Using the virtual displacement principle and Navier's solution technique, the numerical results of non-dimensional stresses and displacements are computed. Finally, the non-dimensional formulas' results are validated with the existing literature, and excellent agreement is detected between the results. More importantly, several complementary parametric studies with the effect of various geometric and material factors are examined. The present analytical model is suitable for investigating the bending of simply-supported FGM plates for special technical engineering applications.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.779-789
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• 2022

This work presents a non-linear cylindrical bending analysis of functionally graded plate reinforced by single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) in thermal environment using a simple integral higher-order shear deformation theory (HSDT). This theory does not require shear correction factors and the transverse shear stresses vary parabolically through the thickness. The material properties of SWCNTs are assumed to be temperature-dependent and are obtained from molecular dynamics simulations. The material properties of functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced composites (FG-CNTCRs) are considered to be graded in the thickness direction, and are estimated through a micromechanical model. The non-linear strain-displacement relations in the Von Karman sense are used to study the effect of geometric non-linearity and the solution is obtained by minimization of the total potential energy. The numerical illustrations concern the nonlinear bending response of FG-CNTRC plates under different sets of thermal environmental conditions, from which results for uniformly distributed CNTRC plates are obtained as benchmarks.