• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.353-360
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• 2022

Due to the dense and complicated working environment, the construction industry is susceptible to many accidents. Worker's fall is a severe problem at the construction site, including falling into holes or openings because of the inadequate coverings as per the safety rules. During the construction or demolition of a building, openings and holes are formed in the floors and roofs. Many workers neglect to cover openings for ease of work while being aware of the risks of holes, openings, and gaps at heights. However, there are safety rules for worker safety; the holes and openings must be covered to prevent falls. The safety inspector typically examines it by visiting the construction site, which is time-consuming and requires safety manager efforts. Therefore, this study presented a worker-driven approach (the worker is involved in the reporting process) to facilitate safety managers by developing integrated computer vision and inertia sensors-based mobile applications to identify openings. The TensorFlow framework is used to design Convolutional Neural Network (CNN); the designed CNN is trained on a custom dataset for binary class openings and covered and deployed on an android smartphone. When an application captures an image, the device also extracts the accelerometer values to determine the inclination in parallel with the classification task of the device to predict the final output as floor (openings/ covered), wall (openings/covered), and roof (openings / covered). The proposed worker-driven approach will be extended with other case scenarios at the construction site.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.157-174
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• 2020

The in-situ pushover test differs from the shake-table test because it is performed outdoors and thus its size is not restricted by space, which allows us to test a full-size building. However, to build a new full-size building for the test is not economical, consequently scholars around the world usually make scale structures or full-scale component units to be tested in the laboratory. However, if in-situ pushover tests can be performed on full-size structures, then the seismic behaviors of buildings during earthquakes can be grasped. In view of this, this study conducts two in-situ pushover tests of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. One is a masonry-infilled RC building with openings (the openings ratio of masonry infill wall is between 24% and 51%) and the other is an RC building without masonry infill. These two in-situ pushover tests adopt obsolescent RC buildings, which will be demolished, to conduct experiment and successfully obtain seismic capacity curves of the buildings. The test results are available for the development or verification of a seismic evaluation model. This paper uses ASCE 41-17 as the main evaluation model and is accompanied by a simplified pushover analysis, which can predict the seismic capacity curves of low-rise buildings in Taiwan. The predicted maximum base shear values for masonry-infilled RC buildings with openings and for RC buildings without masonry infill are, respectively, 69.69% and 87.33% of the test values. The predicted initial stiffness values are 41.04% and 100.49% of the test values, respectively. It can be seen that the ASCE 41-17 evaluation model is reasonable for the RC building without masonry infill walls. In contrast, the analysis result for the masonry infilled RC building with openings is more conservative than the test value because the ASCE 41-17 evaluation model is limited to masonry infill walls with an openings ratio not exceeding 40%. This study suggests using ASCE 41-17's unreinforced masonry wall evaluation model to simulate a masonry infill wall with an openings ratio greater than 40%. After correction, the predicted maximum base shear values of the masonry infilled RC building with openings is 82.60% of the test values and the predicted initial stiffness value is 67.13% of the test value. Therefore, the proposed method in this study can predict the seismic behavior of a masonry infilled RC frame with large openings.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.25-46
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• 2013

This paper presents a boundary-layer wind tunnel (BLWT) study on the effect of variable dominant openings on steady and transient responses of wind-induced internal pressure in a low-rise building. The paper presents a parametric study focusing on differences and similarities between transient and steady-state responses, the effects of size and locations of dominant openings and vent openings, and the effects of wind angle of attack. In addition, the necessity of internal volume correction during sudden breaching, i.e., a transient response experiment was investigated. A comparison of the BLWT data with ASCE 7-2010, as well as with limited large-scale data obtained at a 'Wall of Wind' facility, is presented.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
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• 2003.03a
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• pp.329-336
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• 2003

The box system that is composed only of reinforced concrete walls and slabs are adopted on many high-rise apartment buildings recently constructed in Korea. And the framed structure with shear wall core that can effectively resist horizontal forces is frequently adopted for the structural system for high-rise building structures. In these structures, a shear wall may have one or more openings for functional reasons. It is necessary to use subdivided finite elements for accurate analysis of the shear wall with openings. But it would take significant amount of computational time and memory if the entire building structure is subdivided into a finer mesh. An efficient analysis method that can be used regardless of the number, size and location of openings is proposed in this study. The analysis method uses super element, substructure, matrix condensation technique and fictitious beam technique. Three-dimensional analyses of the box system and the framed structure with shear wall core having various types of openings were peformed to verify the efficiency of the proposed method. It was confirmed that the proposed method have outstanding accuracy with drastically reduced time and computer memory from the analyses of example structures.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.359-369
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• 2018

A model has been developed to predict natural ventilation in a single zone building with large openings. This study first presents pressure-based equations on natural ventilation, that include the combined effect of wind and thermal buoyancy. Moreover, the concept of neutral pressure level(NPL) is introduced to consider the two-way flow through a large opening. The total pressure differences across the opening and the NPL are calculated, and nonlinear equations are solved to find the zonal pressure to satisfy mass conservation. For this analysis, an iterative technique of successively approximating the zonal pressure is used. The results of applying this study model to several simple cases are as follows. When there is no wind and only the stack effect is caused, a one-way flow occurs in both the top and bottom openings in the case of two openings of equal-area, and a one-way flow occurs in the top opening; however, a two-way flow occurs in the bottom opening in the case of two openings of unequal-area. When there is a wind effect, regardless of whether the outside air temperature is lower or higher than the indoor air temperature, air flows into the room through the bottom opening and out of the room through the top opening. As the wind velocity increases, the wind effect appears to be more influential than the stack effect owing to the temperature difference.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.351-365
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• 2002

The box system that is composed only of reinforced concrete walls and slabs we adopted on many high-rise apartment buildings recently constructed in Korea. And the framed structure with shear wall core that can effectively resist horizontal forces is frequently adopted for the structural system for high-rise building structures. In these structures, a shear wall may have one or more openings for functional reasons. It is necessary to use subdivided finite elements for accurate analysis of the shear wall with openings. But it would take significant amount of computational time and memory if the entire building structure is subdivided into a finer mesh. An efficient analysis method that can be used regardless of the number, size and location of openings is proposed in this study. The analysis method uses super element, substructure, matrix condensation technique and fictitious beam technique. Three-dimensional analyses of the box system and the framed structure with shear wall core having various types of openings were performed to verify the efficiency of the proposed method. It was confirmed that the proposed method have outstanding accuracy with drastically reduced time and computer memory from the analyses of example structures.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.3-10
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• 2001

The box system that is composed only of reinforced concrete walls and slabs are adopted on many high-rise apartment buildings recently constructed in Korea. And the framed structure with shear wall core that can effectively resist horizontal forces is frequently adopted for the structural system for high-rise building structures. In these structures, a shear wall may have one or more openings for functional reasons. It is necessary to use subdivided finite elements for accurate analysis of the shear wall with openings. But it would take tremendous amount of computational time and memory if the entire building structure is subdivided into a finer mesh . An efficient analysis method that can be used regardless of the number, size and location of openings is proposed in this study, The analysis method uses super element, substructure, matrix condensation technique and fictitious beam technique. Three-dimensional analyses of the box system and the framed structure with shear wall core having various types of openings were performed to verify the efficiency of the proposed method. It was confirmed that the proposed method have outstanding accuracy with drastically reduced time and computer memory from the analyses of example structures.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2015

Wind tunnel testing of a low-rise building with openings (holes) of different sizes and shapes on a roof corner is conducted to measure the internal and external pressures from the building model. Detailed analysis of the testing data is carried out to investigate the characteristics of the internal and external pressures of the building with different openings' configurations. Superimposition of the internal and external pressures makes the emergence of positive net pressures on the roof. The internal pressures demonstrate an overall uniform distribution. The probability density function (PDF) of the internal pressures is close to the Gaussian distribution. Compared with the PDF of the external pressures, the non-Gaussian characteristics of the net pressures weakened. The internal pressures exhibit strong correlation in frequency domain. There appear two humps in the spectra of the internal pressures, which correspond to the Helmholtz frequency and vortex shedding frequency, respectively. But, the peak for the vortex shedding frequency is offset for the net pressures. Furthermore, the internal pressure characteristics indirectly reflect that the length of the front edge enhances the development of the conical vortices.The objective of this study aims to further understanding of the characteristics of internal, external and net pressures for low-rise buildings in an effort to reduce wind damages to residential buildings.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.5 no.2_3
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• pp.203-233
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• 2005

This paper presents the findings of a design development project for perforated beams fully integrated with building services. A unified design approach for both steel and composite beams with large rectangular web openings is proposed which is based on plastic design methods and formulated in accordance with analytical structural design principles. Moreover, finite element models are established after careful calibration against test data, and comparison on the predicted ultimate loads of two composite beams with rectangular web openings from the finite element models and the proposed design method is also presented. It is demonstrated that the proposed design method is able to predict the ultimate loads of composite beams with rectangular web openings against 'Vierendeel' mechanism satisfactorily.

• Journal of Industrial Technology
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• v.21 no.A
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• pp.7-14
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• 2001

In building structure, the story height can be minimized by providing openings in beams which serves for the utility equipments passing through. The dead space in false ceiling thus put to economical use in the form of a substantial reduction in materials and construction cost. In the case of steel structure, there is no critical risk in the structural strength because of reinforcing methods of stiffness and steel plate but in the case of reinforced concrete structure, proper provision should be made in designing these openings, otherwise there is a risk that these opening will possibly weaken the structural strength of the building frame to a critical degree. In this paper, for the numerical analysis of the reinforced concrete beams with circular opening in the web, expecting stress concentration of the circular opening, reinforcing methods were studied. Twenty test pieces with each different reinforcing methods were tested and their resisting forces were defined. From the numerical analysis and test results, the followings were founded;(1)high shear stress distributed around the openings reduce the shearing strength, (2)from the numerical analysis, the maximum tensile stress occurred at opening nodes 1,7, these phenomena were agreed with the test results, (3)reinforcing method around openings have to carried out for stopping diagonal cracks, and (4)both, by steel plate, and wire mesh, are effective reinforcing methods.