Pure bending loading conditions are not frequently occurred in practical engineering, but the flexural researches are important since it's the basis of mechanical property researches under complex loading. Hence, the objective of this paper is to investigate the flexural behavior of concrete-filled rectangular steel tube (CFRT) through combined experimental and numerical studies. Flexural tests were conducted to investigate the mechanical performance of CFRT under bending. The load vs. deflection curves during the loading process was analyzed in detail. All the specimens behaved in a very ductile manner. Besides, based on the experimental result, the composite action between the steel tube and core concrete was studies and examined. Furthermore, the feasibility and accuracy of the numerical method was verified by comparing the computed results with experimental observations. The full curves analysis on the moment vs. curvature curves was further conducted, where the development of the stress and strain redistribution in the steel tube and core concrete was clarified comprehensively. It should be noted that there existed bond slip between the core concrete and steel tube during the loading process. And then, an extensive parametric study, including the steel strength, concrete strength, steel ratio and aspect ratio, was performed. Finally, design formula to calculate the ultimate moment and flexural stiffness of CFRTs were presented. The predicted results showed satisfactory agreement with the experimental and FE results. Additionally, the difference between the experimental/FE and predicted results using the related design codes were illustrated.

The analysis of simply supported single-cell skew-curved reinforced concrete (RC) box-girder bridges is carried out using a finite element based CsiBridge software. The behaviour of skew-curved box-girder bridges can not be anticipated simply by superimposing the individual effects of skewness and curvature, so it becomes important to examine the behaviour of such bridges considering the combined effects of skewness and curvature. A comprehensive parametric study is performed wherein the combined influence of the skew and curve angles is considered to determine the maximum bending moment, maximum shear force, maximum torsional moment and maximum vertical deflection of the bridge girders. The skew angle is varied from 0° to 60° at an interval of 10°, and the curve angle is varied from 0° to 60° at an interval of 12°. The scantly available literature on such bridges focuses mainly on the analysis of skew-curved bridges under dead and point loads. But, the effects of actual loadings may be different, thus, it is considered in the present study. It is found that the performance of these bridges having more curvature can be improved by introducing the skewness. Finally, several equations are deduced in the non-dimensional form for estimating the forces and deflection in the girders of simply supported skew-curved RC box-girder bridges, based upon the results of the straight one. The developed equations may be helpful to the designers in proportioning, analysing, and designing such bridges, as the correlation coefficient is about 0.99.

Reinforced concrete (RC) structural walls with L-shaped sections are commonly used in RC buildings. The walls are often expected to sustain biaxial load and Unsymmetrical bending in an earthquake event. However, there currently exists limited experimental evidence regarding their seismic behaviour in these lateral loading directions. This paper makes experimental and numerical investigations to these walls behaviours. Experimental evidences are presented for four L-shaped wall specimens which were tested under simulated seismic load from different lateral directions. The results highlighted some distinct behaviour of L-shaped walls sustaining Unsymmetrical bending relating to their seismic performance. First, due to the Unsymmetrical bending, out-of-plane reaction forces occur for these walls, which contribute to accumulation of the out-of-plane deformations of the wall, especially when out-of-plane stiffness of the section is reduced by horizontal cracks in the cyclic load. Secondly, cracking was found to affect shear centre of the specimens loaded in the Unsymmetrical bending direction. The shear centre of these specimens distinctly differs in the flange in the positive and negative loading direction. Cracking of the flange also causes significant warping in the bottom part of the wall, which eventually lead to out-of-plane buckling failure.

This article analyzed the modulus degradation of concrete subjected to multi-level compressive cyclic loading. The evolution of secant elastic modulus is investigated based on measurements from top loading platen and LVDT in the middle part of concrete. The difference value of the two secant elastic moduli is reduced when close to failure and could be used as a fatigue failure precursor. The fatigue hardening is observed for concrete during cyclic loading. When the maximum stress is smaller the fatigue hardening is more obvious. The slight increase of maximum stress will lead to the "periodic hardening". The tangent elastic modulus shows a specific "bowknot" shape during cyclic loading, which can characterize the hysteresis of stress-strain and is influenced by the cyclic loading stresses. The deterioration of secant elastic modulus acts a similar role with respect to the P-wave speed during cyclic loading, can both characterize the degradation of the concrete properties.

In this paper, a mathematical model is used to the evaluation of thermoelastic interactions in fiber-reinforced material with a spherical cavity. With the goal of establishing the generalized thermoelastic model with thermal relaxation time are exploited. inner surface of the spherical cavity is tractions free and loaded by the uniform step in temperature. The finite element scheme is used to get the problem numerical solutions. The numerical results have been discussed graphically to show the impacts of the presence and the absence of reinforcement.

An AMD control system is usually built based on the original model of a target building. As a result, the fact leads a large calculation workload exists. Therefore, the orders of a structural model should be reduced appropriately. Among various model-reduction methods, a suitable reduced-order model is important to high-rise buildings. Meanwhile, a partial structural information is discarded directly in the model-reduction process, which leads to the accuracy reduction of its controller design. In this paper, an optimal technique is selected through comparing several common model-reduction methods. Then, considering the dynamic characteristics of a high-rise building, an improved balanced truncation (BT) method is proposed for establishing its reduced-order model. The abandoned structural information, including natural frequencies, damping ratios and modal information of the original model, is reconsidered. Based on the improved reduced-order model, a new reduced-order controller is designed by a regional pole-placement method. A high-rise building with an AMD system is regarded as an example, in which the energy distribution, the control effects and the control parameters are used as the indexes to analyze the performance of the improved reduced-order controller. To verify its effectiveness, the proposed methodology is also applied to a four-storey experimental frame. The results demonstrate that the new controller has a stable control performance and a relatively short calculation time, which provides good potential for structural vibration control of high-rise buildings.

The wood-concrete composite is an interesting solution in the field of Civil Engineering to create high performance bending elements for bridges, as well as in the building construction for the design of wood concrete floor systems. The authors of this paper has been working for the past few years on the development of the bonding process as applied to wood-concrete composite structures. Contrary to conventional joining connectors, this assembling technique does ensure an almost perfect connection between wood and concrete. This paper presents a careful theoretical investigation into interfacial stresses at the level of the two interfaces in composite wooden beam- reinforced concrete slab strengthened by external bonding of prestressed composite plate under a uniformly distributed load. The model is based on equilibrium and deformations compatibility requirements in all parts of the strengthened composite beam, i.e., the wooden beam, RC slab, the CFRP plate and the adhesive layer. The theoretical predictions are compared with other existing solutions. This research is helpful for the understanding on mechanical behaviour of the interface and design of the CFRP- wooden-concrete hybrid structures.

Motivated by the demand of seismic protection of museum collections and development of performance-based seismic design guidelines, this paper investigates the seismic fragility of sliding artifacts based on incremental dynamic analysis and three-dimensional finite element model of the artifact-showcase-museum system considering nonlinear behavior of the structure and contact interfaces. Different intensity measures (IMs) for seismic fragility assessment of sliding artifacts are compared. The fragility curves of the sliding artifacts in both freestanding and restrained showcases placed on different floors of a four-story reinforced concrete frame structure are developed. The seismic sliding fragility of the artifacts within a real-world museum subjected to bi-directional horizontal ground motions is also assessed using the proposed IM and engineering demand parameter. Results show that the peak floor acceleration including only values initiating sliding is an efficient IM. Moreover, the sliding fragility estimate for the artifact in the restrained showcase increases as the floor level goes higher, while it may not be true in the freestanding showcase. Furthermore, the artifact is more prone to sliding failure in the restrained showcase than the freestanding showcase. In addition, the artifact has slightly worse sliding performance subjected to bi-directional motions than major-component motions.

This paper, by applying a reliability-based framework, develops seismic vulnerability macrozonation maps for Tehran, the capital and one of the most earthquake-vulnerable city of Iran. Seismic performance assessment of 3-, 4- and 5-story steel moment resisting frames (SMRFs), designed according to ASCE/SEI 41-17 and Iranian Code of Practice for Seismic Resistant Design of Buildings (2800 Standard), is investigated in terms of overall maximum inter-story drift ratio (MIDR) and unit repair cost ratio which is hereafter known as "damage ratio". To this end, Tehran city is first meshed into a network of 66 points to numerically locate low- to mid-rise SMRFs. Active faults around Tehran are next modeled explicitly. Two different combination of faults, based on available seismological data, are then developed to explore the impact of choosing a proper seismic scenario. In addition, soil effect is exclusively addressed. After building analytical models, reliability methods in combination with structure-specific probabilistic models are applied to predict demand and damage ratio of structures in a cost-effective paradigm. Due to capability of proposed methodology incorporating both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties explicitly, this framework which is centered on the regional demand and damage ratio estimation via structure-specific characteristics can efficiently pave the way for decision makers to find the most vulnerable area in a regional scale. This technical basis can also be adapted to any other structures which the demand and/or damage ratio prediction models are developed.

This paper reviewed a few output-only system identification algorithms and identified the shortcomings of those popular blind source separation methods. To address the issues such as less sensors than the targeted modal modes (under-determinate problem), repeated natural frequencies as well as systems with complex mode shapes, this paper proposed a complex wavelet modified second order blind identification method (CWMSOBI) by transforming the time domain problem into time-frequency domain. The wavelet coefficients with different dominant frequencies can be used to address the under-determinate problem, while complex mode shapes are addressed by introducing the complex wavelet transformation. Numerical simulations with both high and low signal-to-noise ratios validate that CWMSOBI can overcome the above-mentioned issues while obtaining more accurate identified results than other blind identification methods.