• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.133-141
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• 2013

This paper presents the seismic evaluation and prediction of a damaged piloti-type Reinforced Concrete (RC) building before and after post-retrofitting under successive earthquakes. For considering realistic successive earthquakes, the past records measured at the same station were combined. In this study, the damaged RC building due to the first earthquake was retrofitted with a buckling-restrained brace (BRB) before the second earthquake occurred. Nonlinear Time History Analysis (NTHA) was performed under the scaled intensity of the successive ground motions. Based on the extensive structural response data obtained form from the NTHA, the fragility relationships between the ground shaking intensity and the probability of reaching a pre-determined limit state was were derived. In addition, The the fragility curves of the pre-damaged building without and with the BRBs were employed to evaluate the effect of the successive earthquakes and the post-retrofit effect. Through the seismic assessment subjected to the successive records, it was observed that the seismic performance of the pre-damaged building was significantly affected by the severity of the damage from the first earthquake damages and the hysteresis behavior of the retrofit element.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.65 no.6
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• pp.689-698
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• 2018

This study focuses on a novel procedure for the robustness assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) framed structures under threat-independent damage scenarios. The procedure is derived from coupled dynamic and non-linear static analyses. Two robustness indicators are defined and the method is applied to two RC frame buildings. The first building was designed for gravity load and earthquake resistance in accordance with Eurocode 8. The second was designed according to the tie force (TF) method, one of the design quantitative procedures for enhancing resistance to progressive collapse. In addition, in order to demonstrate the suitability and applicability of the TF method, the structural robustness and resistance to progressive collapse of the two designs is compared.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
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• 2000.10a
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• pp.245-250
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• 2000

Recent building structures are superior in its ability but they are light and fiexible, and so have problems of vibration. In general, the serviceability of RC slabs was known to be good against vibration because of its hardness. However recent high-rise apartment slabs are mostly light and long, the serviceability about vibration problems of RC slabs was performed. Basic information and its influence on vibrations of RC slabs were revealed. Also, its serviceability against vibration was examined. Many tests were conducted on existing building located in Chung-Nam area. As a results, damping ratio, natural frequency, acceleration amplitude and displacement amplitude which were used to examine serviceability of the RC slabs were obtained. These results on the test building proved that its serviceability conditions were satified to meet the code against vibration.

• Explosives and Blasting
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.1-12
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• 2011

Progressive collapse analyses of high-rise buildings subjected to abnormal loading such as fires, impacts, earthquakes, typhoon, bomb blasts etc. are intended. However it is difficult to perform collapse experiments of the real scale building to determine the capacity of the structure under an extreme loading events. In this study, collapse behavior of a 15 story RC structure building loaded by external explosion pressures were simulated using Extreme Loading Structures (ELS) software. The standoff distance between the RC building and explosives of 1500 kg was 1, 2, 5, 10, and 15 meters. The explosive demolition analysis techniques based on removal of partial support structures following blast scenario was adapted to investigate the transition process of progressive collapse-local damage.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.791-818
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• 2015

RC buildings constitute the prevailing type of construction in earthquake-prone region like Kathmandu Valley. Most of these building constructions were based on conventional methods. In this context, the present paper studied the seismic behaviour of existing RC buildings in Kathmandu Valley. For this, four representative building structures with different design and construction, namely a building: (a) representing the non-engineered construction (RC1 and RC2) and (b) engineered construction (RC3 and RC4) has been selected for analysis. The dynamic properties of the case study building models are analyzed and the corresponding interaction with seismic action is studied by means of non-linear analyses. The structural response measures such as capacity curve, inter-storey drift and the effect of geometric non-linearities are evaluated for the two orthogonal directions. The effect of plan and vertical irregularity on the performance of the structures was studied by comparing the results of two engineered buildings. This was achieved through non-linear dynamic analysis with a synthetic earthquake subjected to X, Y and $45^{\circ}$ loading directions. The nature of the capacity curve represents the strong impact of the P-delta effect, leading to a reduction of the global lateral stiffness and reducing the strength of the structure. The non-engineered structures experience inter-storey drift demands higher than the engineered building models. Moreover, these buildings have very low lateral resistant, lesser the stiffness and limited ductility. Finally, a seismic safety assessment is performed based on the proposed drift limits. Result indicates that most of the existing buildings in Nepal exhibit inadequate seismic performance.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.327-341
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• 2020

Advanced forms of structural design (e.g., displacement-based methods) require knowledge of the non-linear force-displacement behavior of both the overall building and individual lateral load resisting elements, i.e., walls or building cores. Similarly, understanding the non-linear behaviour of the elements in a structure can also allow for a less conservative structural response to be calculated by better understanding the cracked (i.e., effective) properties of the various RC elements. Calculating the non-linear response of an RC section typically involves using 'black box' analysis packages, wherein the user may not be in complete control nor be aware of all the intricate settings and/or decisions behind the scenes. This paper introduces a user-friendly and transparent analysis program for predicting the back-bone force displacement behavior of slender (i.e., flexure controlled) RC walls, building cores or columns. The program has been validated and benchmarked theoretically against both commonly available and widely used analysis packages and experimentally against a database of 16 large-scale RC wall test specimens. The program, which is called WHAM, is written using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to promote transparency and allow users to further develop or modify to suit individual requirements. The program is available free-of-charge and is intended to be used as an educational tool for structural designers, researchers or students.

• Advances in Computational Design
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2024

Present paper deals with the cost effective design of reinforced concrete building frame employing unified particle swarm optimization (UPSO). A building frame with G+8 stories have been adopted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the present algorithm. Effect of seismic loads and wind load have been considered as per Indian Standard (IS) 1893 (Part-I) and IS 875 (Part-III) respectively. Analysis of the frame has been carried out in STAAD Pro software.The design loads for all the beams and columns obtained from STAAD Pro have been given as input of the optimization algorithm. Next, cost optimization of all beams and columns have been carried out in MATLAB environment using UPSO, considering the safety and serviceability criteria mentioned in IS 456. Cost of formwork, concrete and reinforcement have been considered to calculate the total cost. Reinforcement of beams and columns has been calculated with consideration for curtailment and feasibility of laying the reinforcement bars during actual construction. The numerical analysis ensures the accuracy of the developed algorithm in providing the cost optimized design of RC building frame considering safety, serviceability and constructional feasibilities. Further, Monte Carlo simulations performed on the numerical results, proved the consistency and robustness of the developed algorithm. Thus, the present algorithm is capable of giving a cost effective design of RC building frame, which can be adopted directly in construction site without making any changes.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.223-233
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• 2011

A design optimization problem was formulated to minimize the volume of an RC building structure while satisfying design constraints on structural displacements under vertical, wind and seismic loads. We employed metamodel-based design optimization using design of experiments, metamodeling and optimization algorithm to circumvent the difficulty of the automation of structural analysis procedure. Especially, we proposed a design approach of repetitive design optimizations by stages with changing the side constraint values on design variables and limit values on design constraints until a satisfactory design result was obtained. Using the proposed design approach, the volume of the RC building structure has been reduced by 53.3 % compared to the initial one while satisfying all the design constraints. This design result clearly shows the validity of the proposed design approach.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.679-702
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• 2013

During an earthquake, soils filter and send out the shaking to the building and simultaneously it has the role of bearing the building vibrations and transmitting them back to the ground. In other words, the ground and the building interact with each other. Hence, soil-structure interaction (SSI) is a key parameter that affects the performance of buildings during the earthquakes and is worth to be taken into consideration. Columns are one of the most crucial elements in RC buildings that play an important role in stability of the building and must be able to dissipate energy under seismic loads. Recent earthquakes showed that formation of plastic hinges in columns is still possible as a result of strong ground motion, despite the application of strong column-weak beam concept, as recommended by various design codes. Energy is dissipated through the plastic deformation of specific zones at the end of a member without affecting the rest of the structure. The formation of a plastic hinge in an RC column in regions that experience inelastic actions depends on the column details as well as soil-structure interaction (SSI). In this paper, 854 different scenarios have been analyzed by inelastic time-history analyses to predict the nonlinear behavior of RC columns considering soil-structure interaction (SSI). The effects of axial load, height over depth ratio, main period of soil and structure as well as different characteristics of earthquakes, are evaluated analytically by finite element methods and the results are compared with corresponding experimental data. Findings from this study provide a simple expression to estimate plastic hinge length of RC columns including soil-structure interaction.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.63-71
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• 2002

The seismic design regulations have not been applied to the low-rised buildings which are less than 6 stories in Korea. For these buildings which are designed only for gravity loads, theoretical formulas which can estimate the seismic strength of building are derived. The column hinge sway and beam hinge sway mechanism are assumed for the formulars. For the comparisons with the formulas, the results of push-over analyses of 3 and 4 storied buildings are used. It can be shown that the estimating formulas correspond well with the push-over analyses. And the seismic strength of building has a little relations with the number of bay and becomes larger as the building becomes lower. Also, as the ratio and strength of reinforcing steel increase, the seismic strength of building is increased.