• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.283-295
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• 2019

During the seismic performance assessment of existing buildings, staircases are generally not taken into account as structural members but as dead load. Staircases, as secondary structural members, not only serve for connecting successive floors but also provide considerable amount of strength and stiffness to the building which can modify its seismic behaviour considerably. In this parametric study, the influence of staircases on the seismic response of substandard RC frame buildings which differ in number of storey and span, presence of staircase and its position has been examined. Modal Analyses and bi-directional Non-Linear Time History Analyses (NLTHA) were conducted to compare several engineering demand parameters (EDPs) such as inter-storey drift ratio (ISDR), floor accelerations, modal properties, member shear forces and plastic hinge distribution. Additionally, short column effect, variation in shear forces of columns that are attached to the staircase slab, failure and deformation in staircase models have also been investigated. As the staircase was considered in the analytical model, a different damage pattern can be developed especially in the structural components close to staircase.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.755-762
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• 2004

In our country, when the replacement for individual components of equipment in nuclear power plants is required, establishment of individual criteria i.e. Required Response Spectra(RRS) of seismic test/analysis for the component is very difficult because of the absence of Test Response Spectra(TRS) for the individual component to be replaced, from the existing qualification documents. In this case, it is required to perform the structural analysis for the nuclear equipment including the components to be replaced. After the structural analysis, Analysis Response Spectra(ARS) at the point of the component shall be generated and used for seismic test of the component. However, as of today, no standard program authorized for the response spectra generation by using the structural analysis exists in korea. Because of above reason, the STAR-Egs computer program was developed by using the method which calculates directly the expected response spectrum(frequency vs. acceleration type) of the selected points in the nuclear equipment with input spectrum(Required Response Spectra, RRS), based on the dynamic characteristics of the Finite Element(FE) model that is equivalent to the nuclear equipment. The STAR-Egs controls ANSYS/I-DEAS commercial software and automatically extract modal parameters of the FE model. The STAR-Egs calculates response spectrum using the established algorithm based on the extracted modal parameters, too. Reliance on the calculation result of the STAR-Egs was verified through comparison output with the result of MATLAB commercial software based on the identical algorithm. Moreover, actual seismic testing was performed as per IEEE344-1987 for the purpose of program verification by comparison of the FE analysis results.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2013

The seismic response of RC space frame structures with isolated footing resting on a shallow soil stratum on rock is presented in this paper. Homogeneous soil stratum of different stiffness in the very soft to stiff range is considered. Soil, footing and super structure are considered to be the parts of an integral system. A finite element model of the integrated system is developed and subjected to scaled acceleration time histories recorded during two different real earthquakes. Dynamic analysis is performed using mode superposition method of transient analysis. A parametric study is conducted to investigate the effect of flexibility of soil in the dynamic behaviour of low-rise building frames. The time histories and Fourier spectra of roof displacement, base shear and structural response quantities of the space frame on compliant base are presented and compared with the fixed base condition. Results indicate that the incorporation of soil flexibility is required for the realistic estimate of structural seismic response especially for single storey structures resting on very soft soil.

• Computational Structural Engineering
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.125-134
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• 1996

The base-isolation of building, as appeared in many studies, has shown remarkable performance in seismic response attenuation of the internal system as well as the building structure itself. But for the case that the internal system is submerged and hence subject to a considerable hydrodynamic effect, the seismic response of the system due to the base-isolation of building can be greater than the case that they are in air. This paper presents the dynamic analysis of a submerged internal system on base-isolated building to show such an example. The results show that an additional treatment is required to reduce the adverse effects on the seismic response of such a system when the building is base-isolated, and that the system response can be reduced to some extent by an appropriate control of fluid gap between the system and the building structure.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.87 no.2
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• pp.173-189
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• 2023

For a given structural geometry, the stiffness and damping parameters of the soil and the dynamic response of the structure may change in the face of an equivalent linear soil behavior caused by a strong earthquake. Therefore, the influence of equivalent linear soil behavior on the impedance functions form and the seismic response of the soil-structure system has been investigated. Through the substructure method, the seismic response of the selected structure was obtained by an analytical formulation based on the dynamic equilibrium of the soil-structure system modeled by an analog model with three degrees of freedom. Also, the dynamic response of the soil-structure system for a nonlinear soil behavior and for the two types of impedance function forms was also analyzed by 2D finite element modeling using ABAQUS software. The numerical results were compared with those of the analytical solution. After the investigation, the effect of soil nonlinearity clearly showed the critical role of soil stiffness loss under strong shaking, which is more complex than the linear elastic soil behavior, where the energy dissipation depends on the seismic motion amplitude and its frequency, the impedance function types, the shear modulus reduction and the damping increase. Excellent agreement between finite element analysis and analytical results has been obtained due to the reasonable representation of the model.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.515-537
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• 2014

Current seismic codes (e.g. the NTC08 Italian code and the EC8 European code) adopt a performance-based approach for both the design of new buildings and the assessment of existing ones. Different limit states are considered by verifying structural members as well as non structural elements and facilities which have generally been neglected in practice. The key role of non structural elements on building performance has been shown by recent earthquakes (e.g. L'Aquila 2009) where, due to the extensive damage suffered by infills, partitions and ceilings, a lot of private and public buildings became unusable with consequent significant socio-economic effects. Furthermore, the collapse of infill panels, particularly in the case of out-of-plane failure, represented a serious source of risk to life safety. This paper puts forward an infill model capable of accounting for the effects arising from prior in-plane damage on the out-of-plane capacity of infill panels. It permits an assessment of the seismic performance of existing RC buildings with reference to both structural and non structural elements, as well as of their mutual interaction. The model is applied to a building type with RC framed structure designed only to vertical loads and representative of typical Italian buildings. The influence of infill on building performance and the role of the out-of-plane response on structural response are also discussed.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1091-1114
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• 2015

The adequacy of a number of advanced earthquake Intensity Measures (IMs) to predict the structural damage of earthquake resistant 3D R/C buildings is investigated in the present paper. To achieve this purpose three symmetric in plan and three asymmetric 5-storey R/C buildings are analyzed by nonlinear time history analysis using 74 bidirectional earthquake records. The two horizontal accelerograms of each ground motion are applied along the structural axes of the buildings and the structural damage is expressed in terms of the maximum and average interstorey drift as well as the overall structural damage index. For each individual pair of accelerograms the values of the aforementioned seismic damage measures are determined. Then, they are correlated with several strong motion scalar IMs that take into account both earthquake and structural characteristics. The research identified certain IMs which exhibit strong correlation with the seismic damage measures of the studied buildings. However, the degree of correlation between IMs and the seismic damage depends on the damage measure adopted. Furthermore, it is confirmed that the widely used spectral acceleration at the fundamental period of the structure is a relatively good IM for medium rise R/C buildings that possess small structural eccentricity.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.59 no.1
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• pp.15-36
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• 2016

The components of the seismic behavior factor of RC frames are expected to change as structural redundancy increases. Most researches indicate that increasing redundancy is desirable in response to stochastic events such as earthquake loading. The present paper investigated the effect of redundancy on a fixed plan for seismic behavior factor components and the nonlinear behavior of RC frames. The 3D RC moment resistant frames with equal lateral resistance were designed to examine the role of redundancy in earthquake-resistant design and to distinguish it from total overstrength capacity. The seismic behavior factor and dynamic behavior of structures under natural strong ground motions were numerically evaluated as the judging criteria for structural seismic behavior. The results indicate that increasing redundancy alone in a fixed plan cannot be defined as a criterion for improving the structural seismic behavior.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.309-317
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• 2021

In this paper, we present the evaluation results for the conservatism of the response acceleration method (RAM), for seismic response analysis of box-type power cable tunnels. We studied 50 examples, considering the cross sections of 25 power cable tunnels, and two soil conditions for each power cable tunnel. A refined dynamic analysis method considering the soil-structure interaction was further employed to evaluate the conservatism of the RAM. The comparison revelated that the seismic responses computed using the RAM were consistent with those obtained using the refined method, since the averages of response ratio (defined as the ratio of the response by RAM to that of the refined method) approached 1.0, and the standard deviations of the response ratio were less than 5%. Finally, we found that applying a load factor of 1.1 to the response of the RAM allowed for a conservative design for seismic loads.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.338-344
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• 2003

The seismic analysis method of spent fuel storage structures for PHWR plant is introduced in comparison with the method for PWR plant. Investigating the structural characteristics of the storage structures, the former is vertically stacked fuel storage trays, while the latter is welded honeycomb type structure. However, as both structures are submerged and free standing, the analysis methods to anticipate the seismic response of both structures are complicated. For the better estimation of actual seismic response, how to model the dynamic properties and the structural behaviour is the key issue. In this paper, the overall procedures of the seismic modelling and stability check for seismic sliding and overturning of the two different storage structures are discussed in the viewpoint of analysis reliability