• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.115-125
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• 2003

The concrete median barriers are the most popular safety appurtenance that can be installed on narrow medians and are effective in keeping uncontrolled vehicles from crossing into opposing lanes of traffic. It is necessary to install and maintain median barriers because it is very difficult to reserve enough room required for medians in KOREA. Also, concrete median barriers are accepted as the actual alternatives for median barriers, mostly because they require almost no maintenance even after serious collisions. Typical concrete median barriers are 810mm high and have 596mm high glare screens on top of them. However we have experienced a number of "climb" and "roll-over" accidents of heavy vehicles and most of all, there have been some serious accidents caused by the part of broken glare screens. So the improvement study of concrete median barriers started. Prior to this study, a new type of concrete median barrier was suggested which is 1,270mm high and has no glare screens on top of it. So it was required to compare the properties of various types of concrete median barriers including the new type to find the optimal type of concrete median barrier. In this study, we have evaluated the characteristics of four types of concrete median barriers (New Jersey type, F type, constant slope type, and wall type). We have performed many computer simulations for the evaluation of the crashworthiness of them, and through the simulations we have tried to find a proper type of concrete median barrier. Through the computer simulations, we evaluated the structural stability and safety of the four types of concrete median barriers. We confirmed the structural stability and safety of them But in regard to the probability of "roll-over" of heavy vehicles, the higher concrete median barriers showed better performances than the lower. As the result of this study a new type of concrete median barrier was recommended.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.833-840
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• 2008

The time and cost can be reduced when applying partial precast concrete to the stair system in comparison to the cast-in-place or precast method. Because the performance of staircase which is used for evacuation can be largely different from connection types of precast concrete member, we tried to know structural behavior and performance evaluation according to each type of stair joints by experimental study. In the cast-in-place rigid joint, much reinforcement is needed in the end portion because much stress is concentrated in the middle portion. Also, in the pin joint which is used in the connection point, the maximum stress occurs in the middle point, so not only the amount of re-bar is increased but also the serviceability is largely decreased. The bolt type of semi-rigid joints proposed in this study had been increased strength and serviceability which is similar to the rigid joints. Also, its ductility was shown about 0.7 times in comparison to the rigid type and was about 2.8 times for the pin joint type. According to the classification of joint in Eurocode, it can be considered that it is one of the semi-rigid joints which are in the semi-rigid-full strength, and the structural behavior can be expected by using a model which applied to stiffness value decreased by 40 percent.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.321-335
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• 2023

Monitoring sediment loads in natural rivers is the key process in river engineering, but it is costly and dangerous. In practice, suspended loads are directly measured, and total loads, which is a summation of suspended loads and bed loads, are estimated. This study proposes a real-time sediment discharge monitoring system using the horizontal acoustic Doppler current profiler (H-ADCP) and support vector regression (SVR). The proposed system is comprised of the SVR model for suspended sediment concentration (SVR-SSC) and for total loads (SVR-Q_TL), respectively. SVR-SSC estimates SSC and SVR-Q_TL mimics the modified Einstein procedure. The grid search with K-fold cross validation (Grid-CV) and the recursive feature elimination (RFE) were employed to determine SVR's hyperparameters and input variables. The two SVR models showed reasonable cross-validation scores (R²) with 0.885 (SVR-SSC) and 0.860 (SVR-Q_TL). During the time-series sediment load monitoring period, we successfully detected various sediment transport phenomena in natural streams, such as hysteresis loops and sensitive sediment fluctuations. The newly proposed sediment monitoring system depends only on the gauged features by H-ADCP without additional assumptions in hydraulic variables (e.g., friction slope and suspended sediment size distribution). This method can be applied to any ADCP-installed discharge monitoring station economically and is expected to enhance temporal resolution in sediment monitoring.