• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.54-60
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• 2008

The occurrence of fires in heavily populated multiplex buildings is a serious concern. It causes a great threat to many people and a serious social problem. Whenever this kind of fire happens, the authorities are busy preparing partial countermeasures to control the crisis situations. Luckily, the government has enforced a special law regarding safety supervision of majority-used buildings to prepare the basic countermeasures for the buildings' safety. Recently, the multiplex buildings which have multi type compounds have increased in size by getting bigger and bigger. As there are many people who would need to escape and the complicated structures like mazes in buildings of this type, it is not only difficult to prevent a fire but also easy to cause a large loss of lives. For a better fire safety supervision of the buildings, there needs to be passers and owners' good sense of safety, fire proof of the buildings and education of the fire authorities.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.62 no.4
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• pp.391-399
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• 2017

This study investigates the effects of soft story, short columns, heavy overhangs, pounding, and construction and workmanship quality parameters on seismic response of reinforced concrete buildings through nonlinear static and dynamic procedures. The accounted parameters are selected for their common use in rapid screening of RC buildings. The 4- and 7-story buildings designed according to pre-modern codes are used to reflect majority of the existing building stock. The relative penalty scores are employed in this study to evaluate relative importance of certain irregularities in the existing rapid seismic assessment procedures. Comparison of relative scores for the irregularities considered in this study show that the overall trend is similar. The relatively small differences may be accounted for regional construction practices. It is concluded that initial-phase seismic assessment procedures based on architectural features yield in somewhat similar results independent of their bases. However, the differences in the scores emphasize the proper selection of the method based on the regional structure characteristics.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.39-60
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• 2010

In Turkey, majority of industrial facilities are composed of precast buildings. However, precast buildings have suffered extensive damage during Kocaeli and Duzce (1999) and Adana-Ceyhan (1998) earthquakes. Therefore, in this study, fragilities of existing building stock and damage probabilities of precast buildings were studied. For this purpose, building inventories were prepared and variation of structural parameters was determined by investigating the design project of 65 precast buildings constructed in Denizli, Turkey. Twelve analysis models which reflect the stiffness, strength and ductility properties of building inventory were constructed. After the definition of strain based displacement limits and corresponding damage states for buildings, displacement demands were calculated by using non linear time history analysis. During the analyses 360 strong ground motion records were used. Exceedence ratios of concerned damage limits was calculated by checking the displacement demands and then PGV based fragility curves were constructed. Efficiency of strength, stiffness and ductility properties of existing precast buildings were investigated by comparing the fragility curves. The results have shown that the most effective parameters that govern the damage probabilities of precast buildings are stiffness and ductility. It was also stated that the results of fragility analysis and damage and failure observations performed after Kocaeli and Duzce Earthquakes are compatible.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.809-822
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• 2016

Reinforced concrete buildings constitute the majority of the building stock of Turkey and much of them, do not comply the earthquake codes. Recently there is a great tendency for strengthening to heal their earthquake performance. The performance evaluations are usually executed by the numerical investigations performed in computer packages. However, the numerical models are often far from representing the real behaviour of the existing buildings. In this condition, experimental modal analysis fills a gap to correct the numerical models to be used in further analysis. On the other hand, there have been a few dynamic tests performed on the existing reinforced concrete buildings. Especially forced vibration survey is not preferred due to the inherent difficulties, high cost and probable risk of damage. This study applies both ambient and forced vibration surveys to investigate the dynamic properties of a six-story residential building in Istanbul. Mode shapes, modal frequencies and damping ration were determined. Later on numerical analysis with finite element method was performed. Based on the first three modes of the building, a model updating strategy was employed. The study enabled to compare the results of ambient and forced vibration surveys and check the accuracy of the numerical models used for the performance evaluation of the reinforced concrete buildings.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2007.03a
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• pp.837-847
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• 2007

The study focused on the evaluation of maintenance management strategies used in public hospital buildings in Lagos state. It also assessed the labour composition for maintenance operations. In achieving these objectives, opinions of maintenance officers of ten (10) different hospitals in different local government areas of the state were sampled through well structured questionnaires. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. From the analysis, the study revealed that majority of those public hospitals do not have specific budget for maintenance programmes, maintenance policies, maintenance log book and maintenance manual to guide the operatives. About 98% of them do not understand the type of maintenance strategy being used for their maintenance operations. 78% of the maintenance work are only executed when there is a breakdown or in response to user's request. For labour composition, the cleaning of interior and exterior of the building, inspection of building elements, repairs and replacements of building elements are mainly carried out by in-house staff, while the repair and replacement of equipment is by outsourcing. The study also revealed that using in- house staff, reduces costs and provides a higher security while outsourcing provides more flexibility in staffing reduces equipment expenditures and provide better access to special skills. The study recommended proactive measures to provide necessary training and support for maintenance staff and users of these facilities and a means of securing sufficient funds for maintenance programmes.

• 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.

• KIEAE Journal
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.39-46
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• 2013

Recently, the field of construction is putting a variety of effort into reducing CO2, since global warming is being accelerated due to climate changes and the increase of greenhouse gas. For reduction of CO2 in the field of construction, it is required to make plans to cut down heating energy of buildings and especially, it is urgently needed to cut down energy of residential buildings in rural area where occupies the majority of consumption of petroleum-based energy sources. Therefore, this research compared and analyzed the actual energy consumption, by evaluating energy performance of a detached house applying passive house design components for reduction of energy. As the result, energy consumption showed remarkable differences, according to the operation of a heat recovery ventilation unit which is one of passive house design components, and building energy consumption displayed remarkable differences, too, depending on the difference of airtightness performance during building energy simulation conducted in process of design. Based on these results, the importance of airtightness performance of passive house was verified. The result of the actual measurement of energy consumption demonstrated that LNG was most economical amongst several heat resources yielded, on the basis of LPG source energy consumption measured within a certain period of time, and it was followed by kerosene. LPG was analyzed to have a low economic efficiency, when used for heating.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.497-503
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• 2004

In this research, we have performed a T-test to see how the relationship between dependent variable or visual point level and independent variable or visual quantity is in order to clear up the correlation between pattern of visual point and visual quantity by the constituents of a view from a different visual point level and the results are as follows: 1) In case of the character of Mt. Uam landscape of the city, Uamsan is set as a fixed point and about a direction of view(D), the north is a datum point from which the range of direction is distributed within 1800 westwardly and the visual range(R) is also within 2000m. An elevation is an average of 7.40 and the average story of the buildings is 3.85. Here the height of a story is about 4m so the average of the visual point difference is estimated at 15.4m. 2) The type of visual point is divided into the intersection group and the front of the highly used public buildings group. Double intersection types account for about 78.80%(52 spots) which forms a majority part of LCP. 3) The analysis of the difference of visual point level divided by eye level and that of the top of the buildings has been proved that there's a sharp difference resulted from t-test at 1 % significant level. The significant difference of elevation from height difference(l5.93m), however, has not been shown. 4) From the result of T-test about visual quantity by the elements of a view from a different visual point level, the visual quantity of mountain(VQM), sky(VQS), ground(VQG) is significant at about 1% each and that of building(VQB) is at about 5%. The difference in visual quantity of a mountain by the visual point level is at about 4% which can meet a marginal level of LCP necessary for evaluation of mountainscape.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.19-24
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• 2014

Many people all over the world have been conducting a great deal of research to solve the problem of global warming since the great majority consider reduction of CO2 as the only solution for that. That is why the production and conservation of energy is thought to be highly crucial. while it is important to produce energy with the high efficiency, the efficient use of the energy is also important. This paper focused on the development of devices for the reducing electricity which is a primary energy source used in homes, shops, buildings, factories and so on. Also the objective of this paper is to develop the inference mechanism as the core component of the devices. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the inference algorithm for reducing the electricity consumption using SARIMA mode and present the feasibility of the procedure.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.401-414
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• 2014

The economic consequences of large earthquakes require a revolutionary change in the seismic performance objective of residential and commercial buildings. The majority of total construction costs consist of non-structural and architectural costs. Therefore, the aim of this research is to upgrade current Life Safety performance objectives and to offset adverse effects on country's economy after an occurrence of large earthquakes. However, such a proposal cannot easily prove the feasibility of cost-benefit analysis in structural design. In this paper, six generic reinforced concrete frames and dual system structures designed based on Turkish Seismic Code were used in cost analysis. The study reveals that load bearing structural systems with Immediate Occupancy performance level in seismic zones can be achieved with negligible costs.