• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.9-20
• /
• 2003

At present, the information on the foundation-structure interaction is lacking. As a result, the seismic performance evaluation of buildings seldom considers the effect of the foundation performance on the building responses. Recent earthquakes such as the 1993 Hokkaido Nansei-oki Earthquake(M=7.8), the 1994 Northridge Earthquake(M=6.7), the 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu Earthquake(M=7.2), and the 1999 Chi-Chi Earthquake (M=7.6) have shown that building damages are significantly affected by the degree of damage sustained by the building foundation and the interaction between the building and the foundation. This paper presents a nonlinear seismic analysis method for the seismic performance evaluation of reinforced concrete buildings which considers the pile foundation-structure interaction. The proposed method is applied to an actual building which was damaged during the 1993 Hokkaido Nansei-oki Earthquake. The result reveal that the method is able to predict the performance of the building.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.1 no.1
• /
• pp.1-12
• /
• 2005

This paper describes the area of intelligent systems research as funded by the Civil and Mechanical Systems (CMS) Division of the National Science Foundation (NSF). With developments in computer science, information technology, sensing and control the design of typical machines and structures by civil and mechanical engineers is evolving toward intelligent systems that can sense, decide and act. This trend toward electro-mechanical design is well-established in modern machines (e.g. vehicles, robots, disk drives) and often referred to as mechatronics. More recently intelligent systems design is becoming an important aspect of structures, such as buildings and bridges. We briefly review recent developments in structural control, including the role that NSF has played in their development, and discuss on-going CMS activities in this area. In particular, we highlight the interdisciplinary initiative on Sensors and Sensor Networks and the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). NEES is a distributed cyberinfrastructure to support earthquake engineering research, and provides the pioneering NEES grid computing environment for simulation, teleoperation, data collection and archiving, etc.

• Earthquakes and Structures
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.307-317
• /
• 2018

The current study explores the soil-structure interaction (SSI) effect on the potential seismic damage of mid-rise non-seismically designed reinforced concrete frames retrofitted by Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP). An 8-storey reinforced concrete frame poorly-confined due to transverse reinforcement deficiency is selected and then retrofitted by FRP wraps to provide external confinement. The poorly-confined and FRP retrofitted frames with/without SSI are modelled using hysteretic nonlinear elements. Inelastic time history and damage analyses are performed for these frames subjected to different seismic intensities. The results show that the FRP confinement significantly reduces one or two damage levels for the poorly-confined frame. More importantly, the SSI effect is found to increase the potential seismic damage of the retrofitted frame, reducing the effectiveness of FRP retrofitting. This finding, which is contrary to the conventionally beneficial concept of SSI governing for decades in structural and earthquake engineering, is worth taking into account in designing and evaluating retrofitted structures.

• Earthquakes and Structures
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.211-220
• /
• 2017

Observations from past strong earthquakes revealed that near-fault ground motions could lead to the failure, or even collapse of electricity transmission towers which are vital components of an overhead electric power delivery system. For assessing the performance and robustness, a high-fidelity three-dimension finite element model of a long span transmission tower-line system is established with the consideration of geometric nonlinearity and material nonlinearity. In the numerical model, the Tian-Ma-Qu material model is utilized to capture the nonlinear behaviours of structural members, and the cumulative damage D is defined as an index to identify the failure of members. Consequently, incremental dynamic analyses (IDAs) are conducted to study the collapse fragility, damage positions, collapse margin ratio (CMR) and dynamic robustness of the transmission towers by using twenty near-fault ground motions selected from PEER. Based on the bending and shear deformation of structures, the collapse mechanism of electricity transmission towers subjected to Chi-Chi earthquake is investigated. This research can serve as a reference for the performance of large span transmission tower line system subjected to near-fault ground motions.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.67 no.3
• /
• pp.255-265
• /
• 2018

The prestress force effect on the fundamental frequency and deflection shape of Prestressed Concrete I (PCI) beams was studied in this paper. Currently, due to the conflicts among existing theories, the analytical solution for properly considering the structural behavior of these prestressed members is not clear. A series of experiments were conducted on a large-scale PCI beam of high strength concrete with an eccentric straight unbonded tendon. Specifically, the simply supported PCI beam was subjected to free vibration and three-point bending tests with different prestress forces. Subsequently, the experimental data were compared with analytical results based on the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. It was proved that the fundamental frequency of PCI beams is unaffected by the increasing applied prestress force, if the variation of the initial elastic modulus of concrete with time is considered. Vice versa, the relationship between the deflection shape and prestress force is well described by the magnification factor formula of the compression-softening theory assuming the secant elastic modulus.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Educational Facilities
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.45-52
• /
• 2013

In paper after the strong earthquake of recently the Korea neighborhood, the Korean government survey show that the 86% of school buildings in Korea are in potential damage risk and only 14% of them are designed as earthquake-resistance buildings. Reinforcing projects of school have been conducting by the ministry of education, however their reinforcing methods done by not proved a engineering by experiment which results in uneconomical and uneffective rehabilitation for the future earthquake. An experimental and analytical study have been conducted for the shear and flexural reinforcing method of RC beam using composite beam. Based on the previous research, in this study, performance evaluation for the column reinforcing of old school buildings using nonlinear analysis is going to be conducted and strengthening method is going to be on the market after their performance is proved by the test.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.2
• /
• pp.287-299
• /
• 2022

Rather than using smartphones as seismometers with designated locations and orientations, this study proposes to employ crowds' smartphones in buildings to perform fast safety assessment of buildings. The principal advantage of using crowds' smartphones is the potential to monitor the safety of millions of buildings without hardware costs, installation labor, and long-term maintenance. This study's goal is to measure the maximum interstory drift ratios during earthquake excitation using crowds' smartphones. Beacons inside the building are required to provide the location and relevant building information for the smartphones via Bluetooth. Wi-Fi Direct is employed between nearby smartphones to conduct peer-to-peer time synchronization and exchange the acceleration data measured. An algorithm to align the orientation between nearby smartphones is proposed, and the performance of the orientation alignment, interstory drift measurement, and damage level estimation are studied numerically. Finally, the proposed approach's performance is verified using large-scale shaking table tests of a scaled steel building. The results presented in this study illustrate the potential to use crowds' smartphones with the proposed approach to record building motions during earthquakes and use those data to estimate buildings' safety based on the interstory drift ratios measured.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.31 no.2
• /
• pp.141-154
• /
• 2023

After an earthquake, information regarding potential damage to buildings close to the epicenter is very important during the initial emergency response. This study proposes the use of crowdsourced measured acceleration response data collected from smartphones located within buildings to perform system identification of building structures during earthquake excitations, and the feasibility of the proposed approach is studied. The principal advantage of using crowdsourced smartphone data is the potential to determine the condition of millions of buildings without incurring hardware, installation, and long-term maintenance costs. This study's goal is to assess the feasibility of identifying the lowest fundamental natural frequencies of buildings without knowing the orientations and precise locations of the crowds' smartphones in advance. Both input-output and output-only identification methods are used to identify the lowest fundamental natural frequencies of numerical finite element models of a real building structure. The effects of time synchronization and the orientation alignment between nearby smartphones on the identification results are discussed, and the proposed approach's performance is verified using large-scale shake table tests of a scaled steel building. The presented results illustrate the potential of using crowdsourced smartphone data with the proposed approach to identify the lowest fundamental natural frequencies of building structures, information that should be valuable in making emergency response decisions.

• Earthquakes and Structures
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.81-90
• /
• 2023

The maximum drifts are important to the seismic evaluation of steel buildings and connections, but the information can hardly be obtained from the post-earthquake field investigation. This research studies the feasibility of using the loss rate of bolt pretension as an earthquake damage predictor. Full-scale tests were made on four steel connections using bolted-web-welded-flange details. One connection was unreinforced (UN), another was reinforced with double shear plates (DS), and the other two used reduced beam sections (RBS). The preinstalled strain gauges were used to control the pretensions and monitor the losses of the high-strength bolts. The results showed that the loss rate of bolt pretension was highly related to the damage of the connections. The pretensions lost up to 10% in all the connections at the yield drifts of 0.5% to 1%. After yielding of the connections, the pretensions lost significantly until fracture occurred. The UN and DS connections failed with a maximum drift of 4 %, and the two RBS connections showed better ductility and failed with a maximum drift of 6%. Under the far-field-type loading protocol, the loss rate grew to 60%. On the contrary, the rate for the specimen under near-fault-type loading protocol was about 40%. The loss rate of bolt pretension is therefore recommended to use as an earthquake damage predictor. Additionally, the 10% and 40% loss rates are recommended to predict the limit states of connection yielding and maximum strength, respectively, and to define the performance levels of serviceability and life-safety for the buildings.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.28 no.4
• /
• pp.439-447
• /
• 2018

The structural behaviors of cylindrical barns as a specific engineering structure have been considered as a complicated computing process. The structure design against the earthquake load, to protect by using the code, is an urgency avoiding unexpected damages. The situation has been subjected to the applied design method if there would be no failure across the construction procedures. The purpose of the current study is to clarify the behaviors of cylindrical reinforced concrete barns through the analytic methods across the mass and Lagrangian approaches through the whole outcomes comparison indicating that the isoparametric element obtained from the Lagrangian approach has been successfully applied in the barns earthquake analysis when the slosh effects have been discarded. The form of stress distributions is equal with $s_z$ closed distributions to one another.