• Computers and Concrete
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.381-397
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• 2015

Connections are the most important regions in a structural system especially for buildings in seismic zones. In R.C. structures due to large dimensions of members and lack of cognition of the stress distribution in a connection, reaching a comprehensive understanding of the connection behaviors becomes more complicated. The shear wall-to-floor slab connections in lateral load resisting systems have a potential weakness in transferring loads from slabs to shear walls which might change the path of load transformation to shear walls. This paper tries to investigate the effects of seismic load combinations on the behavior of slabs at their connection zones with the shear walls. These connection zones naturally are the most critical regions of the slabs in RC buildings. The investigation carried on in a simulated environment by considering three different structures with different shear wall layout. The final results of our study reveal that layout of shear walls in a building significantly affects the magnification of forces developed at the shear wall-floor slab connections.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.583-592
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• 2018

Today, buildings are exposed to the effects such as explosion and impact loads. Usually, explosion and impact loads that act on the buildings such as nuclear power plants, airports, defense industry and military facilities, can occur occasionally on the normal buildings because of some reasons like drop weight impacts, natural gas system explosions, and terrorist attacks. Therefore, it has become important to examine the behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) structures under impact loading. Development of computational mechanics has facilitated the modeling of such load conditions. In this study, three kinds of RC walls that have different geometric forms (square, ellipse, and circle) and used in guardhouses with same usage area were modeled with Abaqus finite element software. The three configurations were subjected to the same impact energy to determine the geometric form that gives the best behavior under the impact loading. As a result of the analyses, the transverse impact forces and failure modes of RC walls under impact loading were obtained. Circular formed (CF) reinforced concrete wall which has same impact resistance in each direction had more advantages. Nonetheless, in the case of the impact loading occurring in the major axis direction of the ellipse (EF-1), the elliptical formed reinforced concrete wall has higher impact resistance.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.691-710
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• 2012

One of the most popular and commonly used strengthening techniques to protect against earthquakes is to infill the holes in reinforced concrete (RC) frames with fully reinforced concrete infills. In some cases, windows and door openings are left inside infill walls for architectural or functional reasons during the strengthening of reinforced concrete-framed buildings. However, the seismic performance of multistory, multibay, reinforced concrete frames that are strengthened by reinforced concrete wing walls is not well known. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the experimental behavior of vulnerable multistory, multibay, reinforced concrete frames that were strengthened by introducing wing walls under a lateral load. For this purpose, three 2-story, 2-bay, 1/3-scale test specimens were constructed and tested under reversed cyclic lateral loading. The total shear wall (including the column and wing walls) length and the location of the bent beam bars were the main parameters of the experimental study. According to the test results, the addition of wing walls to reinforced concrete frames provided significantly higher ultimate lateral load strength and higher initial stiffness than the bare frames did. While the total shear wall length was increased, the lateral load carrying capacity and stiffness increased significantly.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.119-127
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• 2019

When a structural wall is subjected to multi-directional ground motion, torsion-induced cracks degrade the stiffness of the wall. The effect of torsion should not be neglected. As a main lateral load resisting member, reinforced concrete (RC) structural wall has been widely studied under the combined action of bending and shear. Unfortunately, its seismic behavior under a combined action of torsion, bending and shear is rarely studied. In this study, torsional performances of the RC structural walls under the combined action is assessed from a comprehensive parametrical study. Finite element (FE) models are built and calibrated by comparing with the available experimental data. The study is then carried out to find out the critical design parameter affecting the torsional stiffness of RC structural walls, including the axial load ratio, aspect ratio, leg-thickness ratio, eccentricity of lateral force, longitudinal reinforcement ratio and transverse reinforcement ratio. Besides, to facilitate the application in practice, an empirical equation is developed to estimate the torsional stiffness of RC rectangular structural walls conveniently, which is found to agree well with the numerical results of the developed FE models.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.78 no.3
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• pp.269-280
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• 2021

Reinforced concrete (RC) structural walls with L-shaped sections are commonly used in RC buildings. The walls are often expected to sustain biaxial load and Unsymmetrical bending in an earthquake event. However, there currently exists limited experimental evidence regarding their seismic behaviour in these lateral loading directions. This paper makes experimental and numerical investigations to these walls behaviours. Experimental evidences are presented for four L-shaped wall specimens which were tested under simulated seismic load from different lateral directions. The results highlighted some distinct behaviour of L-shaped walls sustaining Unsymmetrical bending relating to their seismic performance. First, due to the Unsymmetrical bending, out-of-plane reaction forces occur for these walls, which contribute to accumulation of the out-of-plane deformations of the wall, especially when out-of-plane stiffness of the section is reduced by horizontal cracks in the cyclic load. Secondly, cracking was found to affect shear centre of the specimens loaded in the Unsymmetrical bending direction. The shear centre of these specimens distinctly differs in the flange in the positive and negative loading direction. Cracking of the flange also causes significant warping in the bottom part of the wall, which eventually lead to out-of-plane buckling failure.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.85 no.5
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• pp.655-664
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• 2023

Reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall structures are one of the most widely used structural systems to resist seismic loading all around the world. Although there have been several efforts to provide conceptually simple procedures to reasonably assess the seismic demands of structures over recent decades, it seems that lesser effort has been put on a number of structural forms such as RC shear wall structures. Therefore, this study aims to represent a simple linear response spectrum-based method which can acceptably predict the nonlinear displacements of a non-ductile RC shear wall structure subjected to an individual ground motion record. An effective period and an equivalent damping ratio are introduced as the dynamic characteristics of an equivalent linear SDOF system relevant to the main structure. By applying the fundamental mode participation factor of the original MDOF structure to the linear spectral response of the equivalent SDOF system, an acceptable estimation of the nonlinear displacement response is obtained. Subsequently, the accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated by comparison with another approximate method which is based on linear response spectrum. Results show that the proposed method has better estimations for maximum nonlinear responses and is more utilizable and applicable than the other one.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.385-398
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• 2023

The parameters of the multiple-vertical-line-element model (MVLEM) of reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls are often empirically determined, which causes large simulation errors. To improve the simulation accuracy of the MVLEM for RC shear walls, this paper proposed a novel method to determine the MVLEM parameters using the artificial neural network (ANN). First, a comprehensive database containing 193 shear wall specimens with complete parameter information was established. And the shear walls were simulated using the classic MVLEM. The average simulation errors of the lateral force and drift of the peak and ultimate points on the skeleton curves were approximately 18%. Second, the MVLEM parameters were manually optimized to minimize the simulation error and the optimal MVLEM parameters were used as the label data of the training of the ANN. Then, the trained ANN was used to generate the MVLEM parameters of the collected shear walls. The results show that the simulation error of the predicted MVLEM was reduced to less than 13% from the original 18%. Particularly, the responses generated by the predicted MVLEM are more identical to the experimental results for the testing set, which contains both flexure-control and shear-control shear wall specimens. It indicates that establishing MVLEM for RC shear walls using ANN is feasible and promising, and that the predicted MVLEM substantially improves the simulation accuracy.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.581-598
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• 2020

This paper aims to investigate the seismic behavior and influence parameters of the large-scaled thin-walled reinforced concrete (RC) tubular columns in air-cooled supporting structures of thermal power plants (TPPs). Cyclic loading tests and finite element analysis were performed on 1/8-scaled specimens considering the influence of wall diameter ratio, axial compression ratio, longitudinal reinforcement ratio, stirrup reinforcement ratio and adding steel diagonal braces (SDBs). The research results showed that the cracks mainly occurred on the lower half part of RC tubular columns during the cyclic loading test; the specimen with the minimum wall diameter ratio presented the earlier cracking and had the most cracks; the failure mode of RC tubular columns was large bias compression failure; increasing the axial compression ratio could increase the lateral bearing capacity and energy dissipation capacity, but also weaken the ductility and aggravate the lateral stiffness deterioration; increasing the longitudinal reinforcement ratio could efficiently enhance the seismic behavior; increasing the stirrup reinforcement ratio was favorable to the ductility; RC tubular columns with SDBs had a much higher bearing capacity and lateral stiffness than those without SDBs, and with the decrease of the angle between columns and SDBs, both bearing capacity and lateral stiffness increased significantly.

• 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.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.6
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• pp.2135-2146
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• 2022

A nuclear energy facility is one of the most critical facilities to be safely protected during and after operation because the physical destruction of its barriers by an external attack could release radioactivity into the environment and can cause harmful effects. The barrier walls of nuclear energy facilities should be sufficiently robust to protect essential facilities from external attack or sabotage. Physical protection system (PPS) vulnerability assessment of a typical small nuclear research reactor was carried out by simulating an external attack with a tri-nitro toluene (TNT) shaped charge and results are presented. The reinforced concrete (RC) barrier wall of the research reactor located at a distance of 50 m from a TNT-shaped charge was the target of external attack. For the purpose of the impact assessment of the RC barrier wall, a finite element method (FEM) is utilized to simulate the destruction condition. The study results showed that a hole-size of diameter 342 mm at the front side and 364 mm at the back side was created on the RC barrier wall as a result of a 143.35 kg TNT-shaped charge. This aperture would be large enough to let at least one person can pass through at a time. For the purpose of the PPS vulnerability assessment, an Estimate of Adversary Sequence Interruption (EASI) model was used, which enabled the determination of most vulnerable path to the target with a probability of interruption equal to 0.43. The study showed that the RC barrier wall is vulnerable to a TNT-shaped charge impact, which could in turn reduce the effectiveness of the PPS.