• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.3 no.3_4
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• pp.611-628
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• 2012

The inelastic earthquake response of existing, reinforced concrete buildings with an open ground story, designed according to the old Greek codes, is investigated before and after their seismic strengthening with steel braces restricted to the open ground stories. The seismic performance evaluation is based on Part 3 of Eurocode 8 for assessment and retrofitting of buildings. Three and five-story, symmetric and non-symmetric buildings are subjected to a set of seven pairs of synthetic accelerograms, compatible with the design spectrum, and conclusions are drawn regarding the effectiveness of the strengthening solutions. Seismic behavior of the selected models confirms results of previous work regarding the insufficient capacity of the open ground stories for design level earthquakes. It is also shown that strengthening only the weak ground story, a choice having the substantial advantage of low cost and continued usage of the building during its seismic retrofitting, can remove the inherent weakness without shifting the problem to the stories above and thus making such buildings at least as strong as those without a weak first story. This partial strengthening is possible for symmetric as well as eccentric buildings, in which torsion plays a further detrimental role.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.667-689
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• 2014

Structural walls (also known as shear walls) are one of the common lateral load resisting elements in reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in seismic regions. The performance of RC structural walls in recent earthquakes has exposed some problems with the existing design of RC structural walls. The main issues lie around the buckling of bars, out-of plane deformation of the wall (especially the zone deteriorated in compression), reinforcement getting snapped beneath a solitary thin crack etc. This study compares performance of a typical wall designed by different standards. For this purpose, a case study RC shear wall is taken from the Hotel Grand Chancellor in Christchurch which was designed according to the 1982 version of the New Zealand concrete structures standard (NZS3101:1982). The wall is redesigned in this study to comply with the detailing requirements of three standards; ACI-318-11, NZS3101:2006 and Eurocode 8 in such a way that they provide the same flexural and shear capacity. Based on section analysis and pushover analysis, nonlinear responses of the walls are compared in terms of their lateral load capacity and curvature as well as displacement ductilities, and the effect of the code limitations on nonlinear responses of the different walls are evaluated. A parametric study is also carried out to further investigate the effect of confinement length and axial load ratio on the lateral response of shear walls.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.4
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• pp.563-576
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• 2022

This study aimed to evaluate the progressive collapse potential of buildings designed using conventional design codes for the merchant occupancy classification and subjected to a sudden column failure. For this purpose, three reinforced concrete buildings having different story numbers were designed according to the seismic design recommendations of TSCB-2019. Later on, the buildings were analyzed using the GSA-2016 and UFC 4-023-03 to observe their progressive collapse responses. Three columns were removed independently in the structures from different locations. Nonlinear dynamic analysis method for the alternate path direct design approach was implemented for the design evaluation. The plasticity of the structural members was simulated by using nonlinear fiber hinges. The moment, axial, and shear force interaction on the hinges was considered by the Modified Compression Field Theory. Moreover, an existing experimental study investigating the progressive collapse behavior of reinforced concrete structures was used to observe the validation of nonlinear fiber hinges and the applied analysis methodology. The study results deduce that a limited local collapse disproportionately more extensive than the initial failure was experienced on the buildings designed according to TSCB-2019. The mercantile structures designed according to current seismic codes require additional direct design considerations to improve their progressive collapse resistance against the risk of a sudden column loss.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.233-248
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• 2020

In this article, one of the procedures to design viscous dampers proposed in literature is applied to 3D asymmetric-plan buildings, considering different distributions for the damping coefficients, which are assumed to be proportional to specific structural or response parameters. The main purpose was to investigate the effectiveness of different vertical and in-plan distributions of the damping coefficients of nonlinear viscous dampers for the seismic retrofit of existing buildings. For comparison purposes, all the distributions were applied utilizing both a simplified and an extended method for the 3D structures, where the simplified method takes into account only the translation in the seismic direction, and the extended method considers the translations along the two orthogonal directions together with the floor rotations. The proposed distributions were then applied to a typical case study involving an asymmetric-plan six-storey RC building. The effectiveness of the different distributions was examined through time-history analyses, assuming nonlinear behaviour for both the viscous dampers and the structural elements. The results of the nonlinear dynamic analyses were examined in terms of maximum and residual inter-storey drifts, peak floor accelerations and maximum damper forces.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.53-62
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• 2017

This study aims to establish a seismic resistance performance evaluation method that makes sure to secure the seismic resistance performance of the existing mid-low story reinforced concrete structures. This study focuses on the development of the seismic resistance performance evaluation method for the overall seismic resistance performance evaluation on the buildings by applying fuzzy theory. This seismic resistance performance evaluation method considers the mutual relations among the type of force, the type of member, the type of story, and the states of deterioration of the buildings. The total seismic resistance performance index from this method was calculated by the intensity weight of each evaluation item, fuzzy measure, fuzzy integration. Moreover, the evaluation methodology was established in this study to identify the performance level of the Immediate Occupancy, Life Safe, Collapse Prevention by applying the fuzzy theory.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.56-66
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• 2015

This study aims at developing a new seismic resistant method by using precast concrete wall panels for existing low-rise, reinforced concrete beam-column buildings such as school buildings. Three quasi-static hysteresis loading tests were performed on one unreinforced beam-column specimen and two reinforced specimens with U-type precast wall panels. Seismic resistant test of anchored and welded steel plate connections manifested an average of 2.8 times increase in the maximum loading (average 591.8 kN) in comparison to unreinforced beam-column specimen. The maximum drift ratios were also shown between 1.4% and 2.7%. An analytical study was performed while assuming the RC column on the right side and the vertical element of the reinforced PC panel to behave in completely composite manner and the RC column on the left side and PC panel to behave in completely non-composite manner when loading was exerted from upper right end of RC frame of specimen to its left side. It was found with the assumptions that the overall flexural behavior in principle agreed with the experimental result.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.4
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• pp.429-438
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• 2017

Structural design has an imperative role in deciding the failure possibility of a Reinforced Concrete (RC) structure. Recent research works achieved the goal of predicting the structural failure of the RC structure with the assistance of machine learning techniques. Previously, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been trained supported by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to classify RC structures with reasonable accuracy. Though, keeping in mind the sensitivity in predicting the structural failure, more accurate models are still absent in the context of Machine Learning. Since the efficiency of multi-objective optimization over single objective optimization techniques is well established. Thus, the motivation of the current work is to employ a Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) to train the Neural Network (NN) based model. In the present work, the NN has been trained with MOGA to minimize the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Maximum Error (ME) toward optimizing the weight vector of the NN. The model has been tested by using a dataset consisting of 150 RC structure buildings. The proposed NN-MOGA based model has been compared with Multi-layer perceptron-feed-forward network (MLP-FFN) and NN-PSO based models in terms of several performance metrics. Experimental results suggested that the NN-MOGA has outperformed other existing well known classifiers with a reasonable improvement over them. Meanwhile, the proposed NN-MOGA achieved the superior accuracy of 93.33% and F-measure of 94.44%, which is superior to the other classifiers in the present study.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.14 no.10
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• pp.5199-5205
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• 2013

Despite the increasing incidence of earthquakes in recent years, many of the existing buildings don't have appropriate seismic performance due to the deterioration or structural characteristics. In particular, a piloti-type RC shear wall structure, which is one of the building types in Korea, is highly vulnerable to earthquakes due to a great lack of shear function that can resist lateral force caused by the earthquake since the first floor is mostly soft story, and it is classified as weak story. In this regard, a study on the damage state criterion for the piloti-type RC shear wall structures was carried out. The capacity spectrum was calculated through the structural analysis by selecting typical type of buildings of shear wall systems, and damage state criterion was defined based on the shape of the capacity spectrum.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.82-88
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• 2010

The purpose of this research is a seismic capacity evaluation and strengthening of existing railway station buildings, which were constructed before the seismic design code activated. The seismic capacity of 2nd story RC station building is evaluated by using nonlinear time-history analysis. Analysis results are checked by story drift ratio and story shear, which are described in design code. As a result, the story shears are exceeding the base shear of the design code, the appropriate seismic strengthening methods are needed. To improve the seismic capacity, metallic dampers are used. Evaluation parameters are metallic damper shape and damper installation methods. Dampers are installed in four places in X and Y directions of station buildings. By reviewing of time-history analysis results, the metallic damper, which is installed inverted K-brace type, shows a better seismic performance than other damper shape and installation methods.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.187-201
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• 2018

The paper describes a modified cyclic bar model including bond-slip phenomena between steel reinforcing bars and surrounding concrete. The model is focused on plain bar and is useful, for its simplicity, for the seismic analyses of RC structures with plain bars and insufficient constructive details, such as in the case of '60s -'70s Mediterranean buildings. The model is based on an imposed exponential displacements field along the bar including both steel deformation and slip; through the adoption of equilibrium and compatibility equations a stress-slip law can be deducted and simply applied, with opportune operations, to RC numerical models. This study aims to update and complete the original monotonic model published by the authors, solving some numerical inconsistencies and, mostly, introducing the cyclic formulation. The first aim is achieved replacing the imposed linear displacement field along the bar with an exponential too, while the cyclic behaviour is described through a formulation based on the results of parametric analyses concerning a large range of steel and concrete properties and geometric configurations. Validations of the proposed model with experimental results available in the current literature confirm its accuracy and the reduced computational burden, highlighting its suitability in performing nonlinear analyses of RC structures.