• Computers and Concrete
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1041-1051
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• 2016

In this study, the construction of a reinforced concrete bridge pier was analyzed from durability point of view. The goal of the study is to analyze the crack iniation condition due to construction and present some recommendations for construction conditions of the reinforced concrete bridge pier. The bridge is located at the western port area of Shenzhen, where the climate is high temperature and humidity. To control the cracking of concrete, a construction simulation was carried out for a heat transfer problem as well as a thermal stress problem. A shrinkage model for heat produced due to cement hydration and a Burger constitutive model to simulate the creep effect are used. The modelling based on Femmasse(C) is verified by comparing with the testing results of a real underground abutment. For the bridge pier, the temperature and stress distribution, as well as their evolution with time are shown. To simulate the construction condition, four initial concrete temperatures ($5^{\circ}C$, $10^{\circ}C$, $15^{\circ}C$, $20^{\circ}C$) and three demoulding time tips (48h, 72h, 96h) are investigated. From the results, it is concluded that a high initial concrete temperature could result in a high extreme internal temperature, which causes the early peak temperature and the larger principle stresses. The demoulding time seems to be less important for the chosen study cases. Currently used 72 hours in the construction practice may be a reasonable choice.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.7-17
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• 2017

In Chinese Design Codes, for super high-rise buildings with complex structural distribution, which are regarded as code-exceeding buildings, elasto-plastic time history analysis is needed to validate the requirement of "no collapse under rare earthquake". In this paper, a 117-story super high-rise building is discussed. It has a height of 597 m and a height-width ratio of 9.5, which have both exceeded the limitations stipulated by the Chinese Design Codes. Mega columns adopted in this structure have cross section area of about $45m^2$ at the bottom, which is infrequent in practical projects. NosaCAD and Perform-3D, both widely used in nonlinear analyses, were chosen in this study, with which two model were established and analyzed, respectively. Elasto-plastic time history analysis was conducted to look into its seismic behavior, emphasizing on the stress state and deformation abilities under intensive seismic excitation.From the comparisons on the results under rare earthquake obtained from NosaCAD and Perform-3D, the overall responses such as roof displacement, inter story drift, base shear and damage pattern of the whole structure from each software show agreement to an extent. Besides, the deformation of the structure is below the limitation of the Chinese Codes, the time sequence and distribution of damages on core tubes are reasonable, and can dissipate certain inputted energy, which indicates that the structure can meet the requirement of "no collapse under rare earthquake".

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.59-68
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• 2017

This study focused on modeling the behavior of the compressive stress using the average strain and ultrasonic test results in concrete. Feed-forward backpropagation artificial neural network (ANN) models were used to compare four types of concrete mixtures with varying water cement ratio (WC), ordinary concrete (ORC) and concrete with short steel fiber-reinforcement (FRC). Sixteen (16) $150mm{\times}150mm{\times}150mm$ concrete cubes were used; each contained eighteen (18) data sets. Ultrasonic test with pitch-catch configuration was conducted at each loading state to record linear and nonlinear test response with multiple step loads. Statistical Spearman's rank correlation was used to reduce the input parameters. Different types of concrete produced similar top five input parameters that had high correlation to compressive stress: average strain (${\varepsilon}$), fundamental harmonic amplitude (A1), $2^{nd}$ harmonic amplitude (A2), $3^{rd}$ harmonic amplitude (A3), and peak to peak amplitude (PPA). Twenty-eight ANN models were trained, validated and tested. A model was chosen for each WC with the highest Pearson correlation coefficient (R) in testing, and the soundness of the behavior for the input parameters in relation to the compressive stress. The ANN model showed increasing WC produced delayed response to stress at initial stages, abruptly responding after 40%. This was due to the presence of more voids for high water cement ratio that activated Contact Acoustic Nonlinearity (CAN) at the latter stage of the loading path. FRC showed slow response to stress than ORC, indicating the resistance of short steel fiber that delayed stress increase against the loading path.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.79-85
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• 2017

This paper summarizes the experimental study of the shear behaviour of Hybrid Fibre Reinforced Concrete (HFRC) beams retrofitted by using externally bonded Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) laminates. To attain the set-out objectives of the present investigation, steel fibre of 1% and polypropylene fibre of 0.30% was used for hybrid steel-polypropylene fibre reinforced concrete: whereas for hybrid glass-polypropylene fibre reinforced concrete, glass fibre by 0.03% and polypropylene fibre of 0.03% by volume of concrete was used. In this study, 9 numbers of beams were cast and tested into three groups (Group I, II & III). Each group containing 3 numbers of beams, out of which one serve as a control beam or a hybrid steel-polypropylene fibre reinforced concrete beam or a hybrid glass - polypropylene fibre reinforced concrete beam and the remaining two beams were preloaded until shear cracks appeared up to 75% of ultimate load and then preloaded beams (damaged beams) were retrofitted with GFRP laminates at shear zone in the form of strips, as one beam in vertical position and another beam in inclined position to restrict the shear cracks. Finally, the retrofitted beams were loaded until failure and test results were compared. The experimental tests have been conducted to investigate various parameters of structural performance, such as load carrying capacity, crack pattern and failure modes, load-deflection responses and ductility relations. The test results revealed that beams retrofitted using GFRP laminates considerably increased the load carrying capacity. In addition, it was found that beams retrofitted with inclined strip offers superior performance than vertical one. Comparing the test results, it was observed that hybrid steel-polypropylene fibre reinforced concrete beam retrofitted with GFRP laminates showed enhanced behaviour as compared to other tested beams.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.185-201
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• 2020

This research is devoted to investigate the bending and free vibration behaviour of laminated composite/sandwich plates and shells, by applying an analytical model based on a generalized and simple refined higher-order shear deformation theory (RHSDT) with four independent unknown variables. The kinematics of the proposed theoretical model is defined by an undetermined integral component and uses the hyperbolic shape function to include the effects of the transverse shear stresses through the plate/shell thickness; hence a shear correction factor is not required. The governing differential equations and associated boundary conditions are derived by employing the principle of virtual work and solved via Navier-type analytical procedure. To verify the validity and applicability of the present refined theory, some numerical results related to displacements, stresses and fundamental frequencies of simply supported laminated composite/sandwich plates and shells are presented and compared with those obtained by other shear deformation models considered in this paper. From the analysis, it can be concluded that the kinematics based on the undetermined integral component is very efficient, and its use leads to reach higher accuracy than conventional models in the study of laminated plates and shells.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.127-136
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• 2020

There is an inherent randomness for concrete microstructure even with the same manufacturing process. Meanwhile, the concrete material under the aqueous environment is usually not fully saturated by water. This study aimed to develop a stochastic micromechanical framework to investigate the probabilistic behavior of the unsaturated concrete from microscale level. The material is represented as a multiphase composite composed of the water, the pores and the intrinsic concrete (made up by the mortar, the coarse aggregates and their interfaces). The differential scheme based two-level micromechanical homogenization scheme is presented to quantitatively predict the concrete's effective properties. By modeling the volume fractions and properties of the constituents as stochastic, we extend the deterministic framework to stochastic to incorporate the material's inherent randomness. Monte Carlo simulations are adopted to reach the different order moments of the effective properties. A distribution-free method is employed to get the unbiased probability density function based on the maximum entropy principle. Numerical examples including limited experimental validations, comparisons with existing micromechanical models, commonly used probability density functions and the direct Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the proposed models provide an accurate and computationally efficient framework in characterizing the material's effective properties. Finally, the effects of the saturation degrees and the pore shapes on the concrete macroscopic probabilistic behaviors are investigated based on our proposed stochastic micromechanical framework.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.161-173
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• 2020

Shear keys in precast concrete segmental bridges (PCSBs) are usually match-casting which is very labour intensive. In this research, an innovative match-casting-free construction was proposed by leaving small gap between the convex and the concave castellated shear keys in the joints of PCSBs. Specimen experiment, shear strength analysis and numerical simulation were conducted, investigating the loading performance of this new type of dry joints, the gap dry joints. Compared with match-casting joint specimens, it has been found from experiment that shear capacity of gap joint specimens significantly decreased ranging from 17.75% to 42.43% due to only partially constrained and contacted in case of gap dry joints. Through numerical simulation, the effects of bottom contacting location, the heights of the gap and the shear key base were analyzed to investigate strength reduction and methods to enhance shear capacity of gap joint specimens. Numerical results proved that shear capacity of gap dry joints under full contact condition was higher than that under partial contact. In addition, left contact destroyed the integrity of shear keys, resulting in significant strength reduction. Larger shear key base remarkably increased shear capacity of the gap joint. Experimental tests indicated that AASHTO provision underestimated shear capacity of the match-casting dry joint specimens, while the numerical results for the gap dry joint showed that AASHTO provision underestimated shear capacity of full contact specimens, but overestimated that of left contact specimens.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.203-211
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• 2020

Turkey is located in one of the most seismically active regions of in Europe. The majority of the population living in big cities are at high seismic risk due to insufficient structural resistance of the existing buildings. Such a seismic risk brings the need for a comprehensive seismic evaluation based on the risk analysis in Turkey. Determining the seismic resistance level of existing building stock against the earthquakes is the first step to reduce the damages in a possible earthquake. Recently in January 2020, the Elazig earthquake brought the importance of the issue again in the public. However, the excessive amount of building stock, labor, and resource problems made the implementation phase almost impossible and revealed the necessity to carry out alternative studies on this issue. This study aims for a detailed investigation of residential buildings in Antalya, Turkey. The approach proposed here can be considered an improved state of building survey methods previously identified in Turkey's Design Code. Antalya, Turkey's fifth most populous city, with a population over 2.5 Million, was investigated as divided into sub-regions to understand the vulnerability, and a threshold value found for the study area. In this study, 26,610 reinforced concrete buildings between 1 to 7 stories in Antalya were examined by using the rapid visual assessment method. A specific threshold value for the city of Antalya was determined with the second level examination and statistical methods carried out in the determined sub-region. With the micro zonation process, regions below the threshold value are defined as the priority areas that need to be examined in detail. The developed methodology can be easily calibrated for application in other cities and can be used to determine new threshold values for those cities.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.213-226
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• 2020

The present study covenants with the static and free vibration behavior of nanocomposite sandwich plates reinforced by carbon nanotubes resting on Pasternak elastic foundation. Uniformly distributed (UD-CNT) and functionally graded (FG-CNT) distributions of aligned carbon nanotube are considered for two types of sandwich plates such as, the face sheet reinforced and homogeneous core and the homogeneous face sheet and reinforced core. Based on the first shear deformation theory (FSDT), the Hamilton's principle is employed to derive the mathematical models. The obtained solutions are numerically validated by comparison with some available cases in the literature. The elastic foundation model is assumed as one parameter Winkler - Pasternak foundation. A parametric study is conducted to study the effects of aspect ratios, foundation parameters, carbon nanotube volume fraction, types of reinforcement, core-to-face sheet thickness ratio and types of loads acting on the bending and free vibration analyses. It is explicitly shown that the (FG-CNT) face sheet reinforced sandwich plate has a high resistance against deflections compared to other types of reinforcement. It is also revealed that the reduction in the dimensionless natural frequency is most pronounced in core reinforced sandwich plate.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.319-336
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• 2016

In this study, both two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) finite-volume-based models were developed to analyze the heat transfer mechanisms through the porous structures of cellular concretes under steady-state heat transfer conditions and to investigate the differences between the 2D and 3D modeling results. The 2D and 3D reconstructed pore networks were generated from the microstructural information measured by 3D images captured by X-ray computerized tomography (X-CT). The computed effective thermal conductivities based on the 2D and 3D calculations performed on the reconstructed porous structures were found to be nearly identical to those evaluated from the 2D cross-sectional images and the 3D X-CT images, respectively. In addition, the 3D computed effective thermal conductivity was found to agree better with the measured values, in comparison with the 2D reconstruction and real cross-sectional images. Finally, the thermal conductivities computed for different reconstructed porous 3D structures of cellular concretes were compared with those obtained from 2D computations performed on 2D reconstructed structures. This comparison revealed the differences between 2D and 3D image-based modeling. A correlation was thus derived between the results of the 3D and 2D models.