• Wind and Structures
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.55-70
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• 2011

This study investigates the design criteria required for wind barriers to protect vehicles running on an expressway under a high side wind. At the first stage of this study, the lateral deviations of vehicles in crosswinds were computed from the commercial software, CarSim and TruckSim, and the critical wind speeds for a car accident were then evaluated from a predefined car accident index. The critical wind speeds for driving stability were found to be 35 m/s for a small passenger car, yet 30 m/s for a truck and a bus. From the wind tunnel tests, the minimum height of a wind barrier required to reduce the wind speed by 50% was found to be 12.5% of the road width. In the case of parallel bridges, the placement of two edge wind barriers plus one wind barrier at center was recommended for a separation distance larger than 20 m (four lanes) and 10 m (six lanes) respectively, otherwise two wind barriers were recommended.

• International journal of steel structures
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1617-1630
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• 2018

The crucial differences between conventional rail with split-type connectors and continuous welded rails are axial stress in the longitudinal direction and stability, as well as other issues generated under the influence of loading effects. Longitudinal stresses generated in continuously welded rails on railway bridges are strongly influenced by the nonlinear behavior of the supporting system comprising sleepers and ballasts. Thus, the track structure interaction cannot be neglected. The rail-support system mentioned above has properties of non-uniform material distribution and uncertainty of construction quality. The linear elastic hypothesis therefore cannot correctly evaluate the stress distribution within the rails. The aim of this study is to apply the nonlinear finite element method using the nonlinear coupling interface between the track and structural model and to illustrate the welded rail behavior under the loading effect and uncertain factors of the ballast. Numerical results of nonlinear finite analysis with a three-dimensional solid and frame element model are presented for a typical track-bridge system. A composite plate girder, modeled by solid and shell elements, is also analyzed to consider the behavior of the welded rail. The analysis result showed buckling under the independent calculations of load cases, including 'temperature change', 'bending of the supporting structure', and 'braking' of the railway vehicle. A parametric study of the load combination method and the loading sequence is also included in this analysis.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.119-129
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• 2018

The Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs has promulgated the mandatory design of BIM for road projects of more than 50 billion won by 2020 under the Basic Plan for the Sixth Construction Technology Promotion. As a result, major public clients are attempting to implement BIMs that are appropriate to the situation of each institution. On the other hand, it is difficult to design and construct a proper BIM and accumulate BIM information of the ordering organization because the technical guidelines and standard classification system that can perform BIM effectively have not been presented sufficiently. The characteristics of the road should be managed systematically, e.g., atypical objects, such as earthworks, which are constantly changing along a line; large objects, such as bridges and tunnels; and facilities, such as signs and soundproof walls. To achieve this, a multitude of standard systems should be developed and disseminated, but there have been insufficient studies on practical methods. To solve this problem, this study developed a BIM standard object classification system in the road sector to meet the international standard, accommodate a multi-dimensional information system, and provide a more effective BIM standard information environment that can be utilized easily by practitioners.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.1A
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• pp.75-89
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• 2006

This paper presents a practical and realistic Life-Cycle Cost (LCC) optimum design methodology of steel bridges considering time effect of bridge reliability under environmental stressors such as corrosion and heavy truck traffics. The LCC functions considered in the LCC optimization consist of initial cost, expected life-cycle maintenance cost and expected life-cycle rehabilitation costs including repair/replacement costs, loss of contents or fatality and injury losses, road user costs, and indirect socio-economic losses. For the assessment of the life-cycle rehabilitation costs, the annual probability of failure which depends upon the prior and updated load and resistance histories should be accounted for. For the purpose, Nowak live load model and a modified corrosion propagation model considering corrosion initiation, corrosion rate, and repainting effect are adopted in this study. The proposed methodology is applied to the LCC optimum design problem of an actual steel box girder bridge with 3 continuous spans (40 m+50 m+40 m=130 m), and various sensitivity analyses of types of steel, local corrosion environments, average daily traffic volume, and discount rates are performed to investigate the effects of various design parameters and conditions on the LCC-effectiveness. From the numerical investigation, it has been observed that local corrosion environments and the number of truck traffics significantly influence the LCC-effective optimum design of steel bridges, and thus realized that these conditions should be considered as crucial parameters for the optimum LCC-effective design.

• Journal of Korean Society of societal Security
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.63-68
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• 2009

Seismic design of newly built bridges can be considered and carried out during construction process according to the revised road bridge design standard issued recently. While for the existing reinforced concrete bridge priers under service before new standard implements, their resistance capacity against lateral seismic loading is inferior. In this research, seismic reinforcing for existing bridge piers by nickel-chrome alloy bar has been analyzed. Based on the established model by MIDAS program, the behaviors of bridge piers including deformation and stress with and without nickel-chrome alloy reinforcing bars have been compared and discussed under lateral seismic loading. And the advantages of using nickel-chrome alloy bar as seismic reinforcement over other materials, such as good performance, good economy etc. have been demonstrated by comparison with other researches. Also the anti-seismic efficiency of nickel-chrome alloy reinforcing bars has been confirmed by MIDAS modeling analysis.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.723-732
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• 2019

Globally road transport networks are subjected to continuous levels of stress from increasing loading and environmental effects. As the most popular mean of transport in the UK the condition of this civil infrastructure is a key indicator of economic growth and productivity. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems can provide a valuable insight to the true condition of our aging infrastructure. In particular, monitoring of the displacement of a bridge structure under live loading can provide an accurate descriptor of bridge condition. In the past B-WIM systems have been used to collect traffic data and hence provide an indicator of bridge condition, however the use of such systems can be restricted by bridge type, assess issues and cost limitations. This research provides a non-contact low cost AI based solution for vehicle classification and associated bridge displacement using computer vision methods. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been adapted to develop the QUBYOLO vehicle classification method from recorded traffic images. This vehicle classification was then accurately related to the corresponding bridge response obtained under live loading using non-contact methods. The successful identification of multiple vehicle types during field testing has shown that QUBYOLO is suitable for the fine-grained vehicle classification required to identify applied load to a bridge structure. The process of displacement analysis and vehicle classification for the purposes of load identification which was used in this research adds to the body of knowledge on the monitoring of existing bridge structures, particularly long span bridges, and establishes the significant potential of computer vision and Deep Learning to provide dependable results on the real response of our infrastructure to existing and potential increased loading.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.50-57
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• 2023

Autonomous driving technologies have been gradually improved for road traffic owing to the development of artificial intelligence. Since the truck platooning is beneficial in terms of the associated transporting expenses, the Connected-Automated Vehicle technology is rapidly evolving. The structural performance is, however, rarely investigated to capture the effect of truck platooning on civil infrastructures.In this study, the dynamic behavior of bridges under truck platooning was investigated, and the amplification factor of responses was estimated considering several parameters associated with the driving conditions. Artificial intelligence techniques were used to estimate the maximum response of the mid span of a bridge as the platooning vehicles passing, and the importance of the parameters was evaluated. The most suitable algorithm was selected by evaluating the consistency of the estimated displacement.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.153-166
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• 2023

Health monitoring of civil infrastructures, in particular, old bridges that are still in service, has become more than necessary, given the risk that a possible degradation or failure of these infrastructures can induce on the safety of users in addition to the resulting commercial and economic impact. Bridge integrity assessment has attracted significant research efforts over the past forty years with the aim of developing new damage identification methods applicable to real structures. The bridge of Ouled Mimoun (Tlemcen, Algeria) is one of the oldest railway structure in the country. It was built in 1889. This bridge, which is too low with respect to the level of the road, has suffered multiple shocks from various machines that caused considerable damage to its central part. The present work aims to analyze the stability of this bridge by identifying damages and evaluating the damage rate in different parts of the structure on the basis of a finite element model. The applied method is based on an inverse analysis of the normal stress responses that were calculated from the corresponding recorded strains, during the passage of a real train, by means of a set of strain gauges placed on certain elements of the bridge. The results obtained from the inverse analysis made it possible to successfully locate areas that were really damaged and to estimate the damage rate. These results were also used to detect an excessive rigidity in certain elements due to the presence of plates, which were neglected in the numerical reference model. In the case of the continuous bridge monitoring, this developed method will be a very powerful tool as a smart health monitoring system, allowing engineers to take in time decisions in the event of bridge damage.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.145-163
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• 2024

The evaluation of dynamic characteristics of bridges under operational traffic loads is a crucial aspect of bridge structural health monitoring. In the vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) system, the vibration responses of bridge exhibit time-varying characteristics. To address this issue, an accurate time-frequency analysis method that combines the autoregressive power spectrum based empirical wavelet transform (AR-EWT) and local maximum synchrosqueezing transform (LMSST) is proposed to identify the time-varying instantaneous frequencies (IFs) of the bridge in the VBI system. The AR-EWT method decomposes the vibration response of the bridge into mono-component signals. Then, LMSST is employed to identify the IFs of each mono-component signal. The AR-EWT combined with the LMSST method (AR-EWT+LMSST) can resolve the problem that LMSST cannot effectively identify the multi-component signals with weak amplitude components. The proposed AR-EWT+LMSST method is compared with some advanced time-frequency analysis techniques such as synchrosqueezing transform (SST), synchroextracting transform (SET), and LMSST. The results demonstrate that the proposed AR-EWT+LMSST method can improve the accuracy of identified IFs. The effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method are validated through a multi-component signal, a VBI numerical model with a four-degree-of-freedom half-car, and a VBI model experiment. The effect of vehicle characteristics, vehicle speed, and road surface roughness on the identified IFs of bridge are investigated.

• Explosives and Blasting
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.38-44
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• 2008

Recently, planning road construction in South Korea is focused on upgrading of the existing road by rerouting or restructuring. For this, roads under current construction in Korea go for more straight in its alignments and routing. Straight routing makes it all the more required to construct many mountain tunnels and bridges in Korea where mountains are so widely spread. Some portal of mountain tunnel is not rarely planed at high steep slope of mountain valley where it is not easy to secure working space for tunnel excavation. Reverse excavation is an alternative measure for excavation of tunnel portal at high steep slope. Construction in reverse excavation method has three important points requiring careful consideration: 1)planning of pilot tunnel in proper width, height, and length etc., 2)measure against the effect of one-side earth pressure to the direction of tunnel portal, 3)securing tunnel safety against shallow ground condition at portal zone. This paper intends to suggest applicable range of pilot tunnel for reverse excavation at the portal zone located at high steep slope, and shows result of study on the appropriateness of a reverse excavation by means of 3D numerical analysis. Result of 3D numerical analysis for reverse excavation at high steep slope shows that pilot tunneling will be applicable to start from the point $20{\sim}25m$ before the portal from inside the tunnel.