• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.505-526
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• 2005

The influence of the inter-story structural pounding on the seismic behaviour of adjacent multistory reinforced concrete structures with unequal total heights and different story heights is investigated. Although inter-story pounding is a common case in practice, it has not been studied before in the literature as far as the authors are aware. Fifty two pounding cases, each one for two different seismic excitations, are examined. From the results it can be deduced that: (i) The most important issue in the inter-story pounding is the local effect on the external column of the tall building that suffers the impact from the upper floor slab of the adjacent shorter structure. (ii) The ductility demands for this column are increased comparing with the ones without the pounding effect. In the cases that the two buildings are in contact these demands appear to be critical since they are higher than the available ductility values. In the cases that there is a small distance between the interacting buildings the ductility demands of this column are also higher than the ones of the same column without the pounding effect but they appear to be lower than the available ductility values. (iii) It has to be stressed that in all the examined cases the developed shear forces of this column exceeded the shear strength. Thus, it can be concluded that in inter-story pounding cases the column that suffers the impact is always in a critical condition due to shear action and, furthermore, in the cases that the two structures are in contact from the beginning this column appears to be critical due to high ductility demands as well. The consequences of the impact can be very severe for the integrity of the column and may be a primary cause for the initiation of the collapse of the structure. This means that special measures have to be taken in the design process first for the critically increased shear demands and secondly for the high ductility demands.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.9
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• pp.1057-1077
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• 2010

An early detection of structural damages is critical for the decision making of repair and replacement maintenance in order to guarantee a specified structural reliability. Consequently, the structural damage detection, based on vibration data measured from the structural health monitoring (SHM) system, has received considerable attention recently. The traditional time-domain analysis techniques, such as the least square estimation (LSE) method and the extended Kalman filter (EKF) approach, require that all the external excitations (inputs) be available, which may not be the case for some SHM systems. Recently, these two approaches have been extended to cover the general case where some of the external excitations (inputs) are not measured, referred to as the adaptive LSE with unknown inputs (ALSE-UI) and the adaptive EKF with unknown inputs (AEKF-UI). Also, new analysis methods, referred to as the adaptive sequential non-linear least-square estimation with unknown inputs and unknown outputs (ASNLSE-UI-UO) and the adaptive quadratic sum-squares error with unknown inputs (AQSSE-UI), have been proposed for the damage tracking of structures when some of the acceleration responses are not measured and the external excitations are not available. In this paper, these newly proposed analysis methods will be compared in terms of accuracy, convergence and efficiency, for damage identification of structures based on experimental data obtained through a series of laboratory tests using a scaled 3-story building model with white noise excitations. The capability of the ALSE-UI, AEKF-UI, ASNLSE-UI-UO and AQSSE-UI approaches in tracking the structural damages will be demonstrated and compared.

• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.516-523
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• 2020

Since the aging of coastal structures have been increased, the researches about the reinforcements of the existing aged structures are needed. Especially, the existing armor units placed on rubble mound structures should satisfy the stability against the increased design wave conditions. However the researches about these design problems have not been performed. In this study, the hydraulic model tests to investigate the stability number about the additionally placed armor unit were conducted. The main armor unit is a Tetrapod. The test results showed that the stability number (Kd) for additionally placed armor units(Tetrapod) increased up to maximum 10% comparing with that for 2 layers tetrapod (Kd = 8) within these test conditions with the pattern placing for existing armor layers and the stable armor layer slope for the non overtopping condition.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.295-310
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• 2019

This study attempts to develop new simplified approximate formulas to predict the fundamental natural periods of vibration (T) for bearing wall systems engaged with special reinforced concrete shear walls (RCSW) under seismic loads. Commonly, seismic codes suggested empirical formulas established by regression analysis of measured T for buildings during earthquake motions. These formulas depend on structure type, building height, number, height and length of SW, and ratio of SW area to base area of structure. In this study, a parametric investigation is performed for T of 110 selected models of bearing RCSW systems with varying structural height, configuration of horizontal plans including building width, number and width of bays, presence of middle corridors and core SWs. For this purpose, a 3D non-linear response time history (TH) analysis is implemented using ETABS v16.2.1. New formulas to estimate T are anticipated and compared with those obtained from formulas of IBC 2012 and ASCE/SEI 7-10. Moreover, the study examines responses of an arbitrarily two selected test model of 60 m and 80 m in height with presence of SWs having middle corridors. It is observed that the performance of the tested buildings is different through arising of considerable errors when using codes' formulas for estimating T. Accordingly, using the present proposed formulas exhibits more reasonable and safer design compared to codes' formulas. The results showed that equitable enhancement is promising to improve T formulas approaching enhanced and accurate estimation of T with reliable analysis, design, and evaluation of bearing RCSW systems.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.101-109
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• 2018

Modular structural systems have been used increasingly for low- and mid-rise structures such as school and apartment buildings. Studies have recently been conducted on the application of the modular structural system to high-rise buildings. To provide sufficient resistances and economical construction for the high-rise modular structural system, a composite unit modular structure was proposed. In this study, the strength of the non-symmetric composite column for the proposed composite unit modular structure was investigated through a series of tests. The experimental study focused on the effect of the slenderness of the column, eccentricity, and through bars on the strength of such a column. Design equations for the non-symmetric column for a modular unit structure were also proposed. From the results, it was found that the proposed design equations provide reasonable strength prediction of the non-symmetric composite column for the modular unit structure.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.251-262
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• 2012

Unit testing is one of the test levels, which tests an individual unit or a group of related units. Recently, in Agile Development or Safety-critical System Development, the unit testing plays an important role for the qualities. According to the definition of unit testing, it is supposed to be done by the developers of units. That is because test models for the unit testing refers to the structure of units, and others but its original developers hardly can understand the structures. However, in practice, unit testing is often asked to be done without the original developers. For example, it is when faults are revealed in customer sites and the development team does not exit any more. In this case, instead of original developers, other developers or test engineers take a product and test it. The unit testing done by a non-developer, who is not the original developer, would cause some difficulties or cause more cost. In this paper, we tests an open source, JTopas, as a non-developer, with building test models, implementing test codes, and executing test cases. To fit this experiment to practical testing situations, we designed it based on the practices of unit testing, which were surveyed through SPIN(Software Process Improvement Network). This paper analyzes which part of unit testing done by non-developers needs more effort compared to the unit testing done by original developers. And it concludes that Agile Development contributes on reducing the extra effort caused by non-developers, since it implements test codes first before developing source code. That means all the units have already included their own tests code when they are released.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.1017-1038
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• 2015

This paper presents a strengthening method that involves the use of ferrocement jackets and chamfers to relocate plastic hinge for non-seismically designed reinforced concrete exterior beam-column joints. An experimental study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the proposed strengthening method. Four half-scale beam-column joints, including one control specimen and three strengthened specimens, were prepared and tested under quasi-static cyclic loading. Strengthening schemes include ferrocement jackets with or without skeleton reinforcements and one or two chamfers. Experimental results have indicated that the proposed strengthening method is effective to move plastic hinge from the joint to the beam and enhance seismic performance of beam-column joints. Shear stress and distortion within the joint region are also reduced significantly in strengthened specimens. Skeleton reinforcements in ferrocement provide limited improvement, except on crack control. Specimen strengthened by ferrocement jackets with one chamfer exhibits slight decrease in peak strength and energy dissipation but with increase in ductility as compared with that of two chamfers. Finally, a method for estimating moment capacity at beam-column interface for strengthened specimen is developed. The proposed method gives reasonable prediction and can ensure formation of plastic hinge at predetermined location in the beam.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.543-557
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• 2017

Results of an extensive study aiming to properly extend the well known pushover analysis into 3-D problems of asymmetric buildings are presented in this paper. The proposed procedure uses simple, 3 DOF, one-story models with shear-beam type elements in order to quantify the effects of inelastic torsional response of such buildings. Correction coefficients for the response quantities at the "stiff" and "flexible" sides are calculated using results from non-linear time history analyses of the simple models. Their values are then applied to the results of a simple, plane pushover analysis of the detailed building models. Results from the application of the new method for a set of three, conventionally designed, five-story buildings with high values of uniaxial eccentricities are compared with those obtained from multiple non-linear dynamic time history analyses, as well as from similar pushover methods addressing the same problem. This initial evaluation indicates that the proposed procedure is a clear improvement over the simple (conventional) pushover method and, in most cases, more accurate and reliable than the other methods considered. The accuracy, however, of all these methods is reduced substantially when they are applied to torsionally flexible buildings. Thus, for such challenging problems, use of inelastic dynamic analyses for a set of two component earthquake motions appears to be the preferable solution.

• Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.138-154
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• 2008

The conventional non-dig underground structure building method which made an appearance to reduce the social and environmental costs and maximize the efficiency of the social overhead capital facilities could not help being uneconomical because of many problems such as unnecessary excessive excavation, water leakage, obstacle interference, difficulty of curvilinear application and connection complexity between propelled and injected bodies due to indiscriminate application of small and large circular steel pipes without consideration of the site conditions. The T.S.T.M, in which a protruded square tube is applied as a propulsion and injection body in a design that considered site conditions such as ground condition, depth of soil and live load, was able to be economical as it solved the problems of water resistance, minimization of obstacle interference and curvilinearity, and we can see that it can be applied to all grounds by utilizing or complementing the target ground in terms of engineering. Also in configuring the transverse section, it is possible to not only secure excellent structural safety but also implement all of the above engineering characteristics not only in the square cross section but also in the arch cross section, so it was possible to build structures on any section or ground, and we could confirm the LCC reduction effect and the VE effect.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.297-319
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• 2013

Two destructive earthquakes occurred on October 23 and November 9, 2011 in Van province of Turkey. The damage in residential units shows significant deviation from the expectation of decreasing damage with increasing distance to epicenter. The most damaged settlement Ercis has the same distance to the epicenter with Muradiye, where no damage occurred while relatively less damage observed in Van having half distance. These three cities seem to have resembling soil conditions. If the damages are evaluated: joint failures and insufficient lap splice lengths are observed to be the main causes of the total collapses in RC buildings. Additionally, low concrete strength, reinforcement detailing mistakes, soft story, heavy overhang, pounding and short columns are among other damage reasons. Examples of damages due to non-structural elements are also given. Remarkable points about seismic damages are: collapsed buildings with shear-walls, heavily damaged buildings despite adequate concrete strength due to detailing mistakes, undamaged two-story adobe buildings close to totally collapsed RC ones and undamaged structural system in buildings with heavily damaged non-structural elements. On the contrary of the common belief that buildings with shear-walls are immune to total collapse among civil engineers, collapse of Gedikbulak primary school is a noteworthy example.