• Wind and Structures
• /
• v.19 no.4
• /
• pp.353-370
• /
• 2014

A new method is proposed in this study for estimating the damping ratio of a super tall building under strong wind loads with short-time measured acceleration signals. This method incorporates two main steps. Firstly, the power spectral density of wind-induced acceleration response is obtained by the wavelet transform, then the dynamic characteristics including the natural frequency and damping ratio for the first vibration mode are estimated by a nonlinear regression analysis on the power spectral density. A numerical simulation illustrated that the damping ratios identified by the wavelet spectrum are superior in precision and stability to those values obtained from Welch's periodogram spectrum. To verify the efficiency of the proposed method, wind-induced acceleration responses of the Guangzhou West Tower (GZWT) measured in the field during Typhoon Usagi, which affected this building on September 22, 2013, were used. The damping ratios identified varied from 0.38% to 0.61% in direction 1 and from 0.22% to 0.59% in direction 2. This information is expected to be of considerable interest and practical use for engineers and researchers involved in the wind-resistant design of super-tall buildings.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.213-231
• /
• 2014

An elastoplastic model for structured clays, which is formulated based on the fact that the difference in mechanical behavior of structured and reconstituted clays is caused by the change of fabric in the post-yield deformation range, is present in this paper. This model is developed from an elastoplastic model for overconsolidated reconstituted clays, by considering that the variation in the yield surface of structured clays is similar to that of overconsolidated reconstituted clays. However, in order to describe the mechanical behavior of structured clays with precision, the model takes the bonding and parabolic strength envelope into consideration. Compared with the Cam-clay model, only two new parameters are required in the model for structured clays, which can be determined from isotropic compression and triaxial shear tests at different confining pressures. The comparison of model predictions and results of drained and undrained triaxial shear tests on four different marine clays shows that the model can capture reasonable well the strength and deformation characteristics of structured clays, including negative and positive dilatancy, strain-hardening and softening during shearing.

• Wind and Structures
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.19-33
• /
• 2008

This research investigates the adaptive input estimation method applied to the multilayer shearing stress structure. This method is to estimate the values of wind load inputs by analyzing the active reaction of the system. The Kalman filter without the input term and the adaptive weighted recursive least square estimator are two main portions of this method. The innovation vector can be produced by the Kalman filter, and be applied to the adaptive weighted recursive least square estimator to estimate the wind load input over time. This combined method can effectively estimate the wind loads to the structure system to enhance the reliability of the system active performance analysis. The forms of the simulated inputs (loads) in this paper include the periodic sinusoidal wave, the decaying exponent, the random combination of the sinusoidal wave and the decaying exponent, etc. The active reaction computed plus the simulation error is regard as the simulated measurement and is applied to the input estimation algorithm to implement the numerical simulation of the inverse input estimation process. The availability and the precision of the input estimation method proposed in this research can be verified by comparing the actual value and the one obtained by numerical simulation.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.78 no.2
• /
• pp.209-218
• /
• 2021

For engineering, there are two major challenges in reliability analysis. First, to ensure the accuracy of simulation results, mechanical products are usually defined implicitly by complex numerical models that require time-consuming. Second, the mechanical products are fortunately designed with a large safety margin, which leads to a low failure probability. This paper proposes an efficient and high-precision adaptive active learning algorithm based on the Kriging surrogate model to deal with the problems with low failure probability and time-consuming numerical models. In order to solve the problem with multiple failure regions, the adaptive kernel-density estimation is introduced and improved. Meanwhile, a new criterion for selecting points based on the current Kriging model is proposed to improve the computational efficiency. The criterion for choosing the best sampling points considers not only the probability of misjudging the sign of the response value at a point by the Kriging model but also the distribution information at that point. In order to prevent the distance between the selected training points from too close, the correlation between training points is limited to avoid information redundancy and improve the computation efficiency of the algorithm. Finally, the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are verified compared with other algorithms through two academic examples and one engineering application.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.39 no.3
• /
• pp.319-335
• /
• 2021

This study proposes a new and highly-accurate artificial intelligence model, namely ANN-IP, which combines an interior-point (IP) algorithm and artificial neural network (ANN), to improve the axial compression capacity prediction of elliptical concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) columns. For this purpose, 145 tests of elliptical CFST columns extracted from the literature are used to develop the ANN-IP model. In this regard, axial compression capacity is considered as a function of the column length, the major axis diameter, the minor axis diameter, the thickness of the steel tube, the yield strength of the steel tube, and the compressive strength of concrete. The performance of the ANN-IP model is compared with the ANN-LM model, which uses the robust Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm to train the ANN model. The comparative results show that the ANN-IP model obtains more magnificent precision (R² = 0.983, RMSE = 59.963 kN, a20 - index = 0.979) than the ANN-LM model (R² = 0.938, RMSE = 116.634 kN, a20 - index = 0.890). Finally, a new Graphical User Interface (GUI) tool is developed to use the ANN-IP model for the practical design. In conclusion, this study reveals that the proposed ANN-IP model can properly predict the axial compression capacity of elliptical CFST columns and eliminate the need for conducting costly experiments to some extent.

• Computers and Concrete
• /
• v.22 no.6
• /
• pp.515-525
• /
• 2018

This paper presents a numerical study on the performance of reinforced concrete (RC) bridge structures subjected to heavy goods vehicle (HGV) collision. The objectives of this study are to investigate the dynamic response and failure modes of different types of bridges under impact loading as well as to give an insight into the simplified methods for modeling bridge structures. For this purpose, detailed finite-element models of HGV and bridges are established and verified against the full-scale collision experiment and a recent traffic accident. An intensive parametric study with the consideration of vehicle weight, vehicle velocity, structural type, simplified methods for modeling bridges is conducted; then the failure mode, impact force, deformation and internal force distribution of the validated bridge models are discussed. It is observed that the structural type has a significant effect on the force-transferring mechanism, failure mode and dynamic response of bridge structures, thus it should be considered in the anti-impact design of bridge structures. The impact force of HGV is mainly determined by the impact weight, impact velocity and contact interface, rather than the simplification of the superstructure. Furthermore, to reduce the modeling and computing cost, it is suggested to utilize the simplified bridge model considering the inertial effect of the superstructure to evaluate the structural impact behavior within a reasonable precision range.

• Computers and Concrete
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.137-150
• /
• 2019

In this paper, surrogate models such as multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and M5P model tree (M5P MT) methods have been investigated in order to propose a new formulation for the 28-days compressive strength of self-compacting concrete (SCC) incorporating metakaolin as a supplementary cementitious materials. A database comprising experimental data has been assembled from several published papers in the literature and the data have been used for training and testing. In particular, the data are arranged in a format of seven input parameters covering contents of cement, coarse aggregate to fine aggregate ratio, water, metakaolin, super plasticizer, largest maximum size and binder as well as one output parameter, which is the 28-days compressive strength. The efficiency of the proposed techniques has been demonstrated by means of certain statistical criteria. The findings have been compared to experimental results and their comparisons shows that the MARS and M5P MT approaches predict the compressive strength of SCC incorporating metakaolin with great precision. The performed sensitivity analysis to assign effective parameters on 28-days compressive strength indicates that cementitious binder content is the most effective variable in the mixture.

• Wind and Structures
• /
• v.28 no.1
• /
• pp.19-30
• /
• 2019

This article present the free vibration analysis of simply supported perfect and imperfect (porous) FG beams using a high order trigonometric deformation theory. It is assumed that the material properties of the porous beam vary across the thickness. Unlike other theories, the number of unknown is only three. This theory has a parabolic shear deformation distribution across the thickness. So it is useless to use the shear correction factors. The Hamilton's principle will be used herein to determine the equations of motion. Since, the beams are simply supported the Navier's procedure will be retained. To show the precision of this model, several comparisons have been made between the present results and those of existing theories in the literature.

• Wind and Structures
• /
• v.28 no.4
• /
• pp.239-253
• /
• 2019

Accurate numericalsimulation of wind field over complex terrain is an important prerequisite for wind resource assessment. In this study, numerical simulation of wind field over complex terrain was further carried out by taking the complex terrain around Siu Ho Wan station in Hong Kong as an example. By artificially expanding the original digital model data, Gambit and ICEM CFD software were used to create high-precision complex terrain model with high-quality meshing. The equilibrium atmospheric boundary layer simulation based on RANS turbulence model was carried out in a flat terrain domain, and the approximate inflow boundary conditions for the wind field simulation over complex terrain were established. Based on this, numerical simulations of wind field over complex terrain under different inflow wind directions were carried out. The numerical results were compared with the wind tunnel test and field measurement data for land and sea fetches. The results show that the numerical results are in good agreement with the wind tunnel data and the field measurement data which can verify the accuracy and reliability of the numerical simulation. The near ground wind field over complex terrain is complex and affected obviously by the terrain, and the wind field characteristics should be fully understood by numerical simulation when carrying out engineering application on it.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.76 no.6
• /
• pp.675-685
• /
• 2020

As the classical response surface method (RSM), the polynomial RSM is so easy-to-apply that it is widely used in reliability analysis. However, the trade-off of accuracy and efficiency is still a challenge and the "curse of dimension" usually confines RSM to low dimension systems. In this paper, based on the univariate decomposition, the polynomial RSM is executed in a new mode, called as DPRSM. The general form of DPRSM is given and its implementation is designed referring to the classical RSM firstly. Then, in order to balance the accuracy and efficiency of DPRSM, its adaptive order revision around the most probable point (MPP) is proposed by introducing the univariate polynomial order analysis, noted as RDPRSM, which can analyze the exact nonlinearity of the limit state surface in the region around MPP. For testing the proposed techniques, several numerical examples are studied in detail, and the results indicate that DPRSM with low order can obtain similar results to the classical RSM, DPRSM with high order can obtain more precision with a large efficiency loss; RDPRSM can perform a good balance between accuracy and efficiency and preserve the good robustness property meanwhile, especially for those problems with high nonlinearity and complex problems; the proposed methods can also give a good performance in the high-dimensional cases.