• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.381-394
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• 2003

While constructing multistorey buildings with reinforced concrete framed structures it is a common practice to provide parking space for vehicles at the ground floor level. This floor will generally consist of open frames without any infilled walls and is called an open-storey. From a post disaster damage survey carried out, it was noticed that during the January 26, 2001 Bhuj (Gujarat, India) earthquake, a large number of reinforced concrete framed buildings with open-storey at ground floor level, suffered extensive damage and in some cases catastrophic collapse. This has brought into sharp focus the need to carry out systematic studies on the seismic vulnerability of such buildings. Determination of vulnerability requires realistic structural response estimations taking into account the stochasticity in the loading and the system parameters. The stochastic finite element method can be effectively used to model the random fields while carrying out such studies. This paper presents the details of stochastic finite element analysis of a five-storey three-bay reinforced concrete framed structure with open-storey subjected to standard seismic excitation. In the present study, only the stochasticity in the system parameters is considered. The stochastic finite element method used for carrying out the analysis is based on perturbation technique. Each random field representing the stochastic geometry/material property is discretised into correlated random variables using spatial averaging technique. The uncertainties in geometry and material properties are modelled using the first two moments of the corresponding parameters. In evaluating the stochastic response, the cross-sectional area and Young' modulus are considered as independent random fields. To study the influence of correlation length of random fields, different correlation lengths are considered for random field discretisation. The spatial expectations and covariances for displacement response at any time instant are obtained as the output. The effect of open-storey is modelled by suitably considering the stiffness of infilled walls in the upper storey using cross bracing. In order to account for changes in soil conditions during strong motion earthquakes, both fixed and hinged supports are considered. The results of the stochastic finite element based seismic analysis of reinforced concrete framed structures reported in this paper demonstrate the importance of considering the effect of open-storey with appropriate support conditions to estimate the realistic response of buildings subjected to earthquakes.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.94-101
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• 2019

Most of the existing rail structures have undergone a lot of aging since a considerable period of time has passed from completion. In particular, among existing railway bridges, many of the plate girder bridges are older bridges that have lived 40 to 60 years or more. Since the treadmill is directly connected to the girder without the ballast, the running load of the vehicle is directly transmitted to the bridge. Therefore, the shock and noise applied to the bridge are larger than those of the ballast bridge, and the dynamic shock and vibration are also relatively large. Therefore, it is very urgent to develop appropriate maintenance, repair and reinforcement technology for existing steel plate bridge. In this study, the authors introduced the characteristics of embedded rail (ERS) developed for improving the performance of the existing plate girder bridge and the techniques solving the vibration and noise problems. In order to evaluate the vibration and noise reduction performance of ERS, a non-ballast plate girder bridge with 5m length of sleepers installed and a plate girder bridge with ERS were fabricated. And, then, the vibration response generated under the same excitation condition was measured and analyzed. Also, the radiated noise analysis was performed using the vibration response data obtained from the experiment as the input data of the acoustic analysis model. As a result of experiments and analyses, it was confirmed that the plate girder bridge's vibration using ERS was reduced by 15.0~18.8dB and the average noise was reduced by 7.7dB(A) more than the non-ballast bridge.