• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.689-707
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• 2008

This study presents a method to evaluate the seismic risk of an extradosed bridge with seismic isolators of lead rubber bearings (LRBs), and also to show the effectiveness of the LRB isolators on the extradosed bridge, which is one of the relatively flexible and lightly damped structures in terms of seismic risk. Initially, the seismic vulnerability of a structure is evaluated, and then the seismic hazard of a specific site is rated using an earthquake data set and seismic hazard maps in Korea. Then, the seismic risk of the structure is assessed. The nonlinear seismic analyses are carried out to consider plastic deformation of bridge columns and the nonlinear characteristics of soil foundation. To describe the nonlinear behaviour of a column, the ductility demand is adopted, and the moment-curvature relation of a column is assumed to be bilinear hysteretic. The fragility curves are represented as a log-normal distribution function for column damage, movement of superstructure, and cable yielding. And the seismic hazard at a specific site is estimated using the available seismic hazard maps. The results show that in seismically-isolated extradosed bridges under earthquakes, the effectiveness of the isolators is much more noticeable in the columns than the cables and girders.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.379-389
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• 2016

This study intends to evaluate the conservativeness of the fixed-base analysis as compared to the soil-structure interaction (SSI) analysis for the seismically isolated model of a nuclear power plant in Korea. To that goal, the boundary reaction method (BRM), combining frequency-domain and time-domain analyses in a twofold process, is adopted for the SSI analysis considering the nonlinearity of the seismic base isolation. The program KIESSI-3D is used for computing the reaction forces in the frequency domain and the program MIDAS/Civil is applied for the nonlinear time-domain analysis. The BRM numerical model is verified by comparing the results of the frequency-domain analysis and time-domain analysis for the soil-structure system with an equivalent linear base isolation model. Moreover, the displacement response of the base isolation and the horizontal response at the top of the structure obtained by the nonlinear SSI analysis using BRM are compared with those obtained by the fixed-base analysis. The comparison reveals that the fixed-base analysis provides conservative peak deformation for the base isolation but is not particularly conservative in term of the floor response spectrum of the superstructure.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.241-257
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• 2003

The first seismically isolated structure in Taiwan was completed in early 1999. Seven new bridges of the Second National Freeway located at Bai-Ho area, a region which is considered to be of high seismic risk, have been designed and constructed with lead-rubber seismic isolation bearings. Since this is the first application of seismic isolation method to the practical construction in Taiwan, field tests were conducted for one of the seven bridges to evaluate the assumptions and uncertainties in the design and construction. The test program is composed of ambient vibration tests, forced vibration tests, and free vibration tests. For the free vibration tests, a special test setup composed of four 1000 kN hydraulic jacks and a quick-release mechanism was designed to perform the function of push-and-quick release. Valuable results have been obtained based on the correlation between measured and analytical data so that the analytical model can be calibrated. Based on the analytical correlation, it is concluded that the dynamic characteristics and free vibration behavior of the isolated bridge can be well captured when the nonlinear properties of the bearings are properly considered in the modeling.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.33-42
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• 2007

This paper describes the state-of-the art research activities on seismic isolation systems for improving the seismic capacities of the bridges in Korea. Though Korea is located in a region of low-to-moderate seismicity, the construction of seismic isolation systems has increased rapidly. The application of seismic isolation system has become popular worldwide because of its stable behavior and economical construction especially for bridge structures. Since optimal reliability level of isolated bridges can be determined as the one that provides the highest net life-cycle benefit to society, or the minimum Life-Cycle Cost (LCC), an optimal design procedure based on minimum LCC concept is more expedient for the design of seismically isolated bridges in areas of low-to-moderate seismicty. To verify the adequacy of the new design concept based on the LCC minimization, experimental studies on seismically isolated bridge are introduced as well, which include pseudo-dynamic test of scaled pier and dynamic field test of full-scale. With the application of seismic isolation systems, many kinds of dampers to improve the seismic capacity of structure are also applied not only to new bridges but also to existing bridges.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.45-54
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• 2018

The seismically isolated nuclear power plants shall be designed for design basis earthquake (DBE) and considered to ensure safety against beyond design basis earthquake (BDBE). In order to limit the excessive displacement of the seismic isolation system of the seismically isolated structure, the moat is installed at a certain distance from the upper mat supporting the superstructure. This certain distance is called clearance to stop (CS) and is calculated from the 90th percentile displacement of seismic isolation system subjected to BDBE. For design purposes, the CS can be obtained simply by multiplying the median displacement of the seismic isolation system against DBE by scale factor with a value of 3. The DBE and BDBE used in this study were generated by using 30 sets of artificial earthquakes corresponding to the nuclear standard design spectrum. In addition, latin hyper cube sampling was applied to generate 30 sets of artificial earthquakes corresponding to maximum - minimum spectra. For the DBE, the median displacement and the 99th percentile displacement of the seismic isolation system were calculated. For the BDBE, the suitability of the scale factor was assessed after calculating the 90th percentile displacement of the seismic isolation system.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.289-299
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• 2019

The tendency to use a probabilistic design method rather than a deterministic design method for the design of nuclear power plants (NPPs) will increase because their safety should be considered and strictly controlled in relation to various causes of damage. The distance between a seismically isolated NPP structure and a moat wall is called the clearance to stop. The clearance to stop is obtained from the 90th percentile displacement response of a seismically isolated NPP subject to a beyond design basis earthquake (BDBE) in the probabilistic design method. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of heating and buckling effects on the 90th percentile displacement response of a lead-rubber bearing (LRB) subject to a BDBE. The analysis results show that considering the heating and buckling effects to estimate the clearance to stop is conservative in the evaluation of the 90th percentile displacement response. If these two effects are not taken into account in the calculation of the clearance to stop, the underestimation of the clearance to stop causes unexpected damage because of an increase in the collision probability between the moat wall and the seismically isolated NPP.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.33-44
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• 2018

Base-isolated nuclear power plant (BI-NPP) structures are founded on expanded basemat as a flexible floating nuclear island, are still lacking the recommendation of the consideration of incoherent motion effect. The effect of incoherent earthquake motion on the seismic response of BI-NPP structure has been investigated herein. The incoherency of the ground motions is applied by using an isotropic frequency-dependent spatial correlation function to perform the conditional simulation of the reference design spectrum compatible ground motion in time domain. Time history analysis of two structural models with 486 and 5 equivalent lead plug rubber bearing (LRB) base-isolators have been done under uniform excitation and multiple point excitation. two different cases have been considered: 1) Incoherent motion generated for soft soil and 2) Incoherent motion generated for hard rock soil. The results show that the incoherent motions reduce acceleration and the lateral displacement responses and the reduction is noticeable at soft soil site and higher frequencies.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.25 no.11
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• pp.1743-1750
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• 2001

This paper presents an analysis of nonlinear response of the seismically isolated structure against earthquake excitation to evaluate isolation performances of a rubber bearing. In the analysis of the vibration of building, the building is modeled by lumped mass system where the restoring force is considered as linear, bilinear and trilinear. Fundamental equations of motion are derived for the base isolated structure, and hysteretic and nonlinear-elastic characteristics are considered for a numerical calculation. The excitation levels are magnified fur the recorded strong earthquake motions in order to examine dynamic stability of the structure. Seismic responses (of the building are compared fur the each restoring force type. As a result, it is shown that the effect of the motion by the nonlinear response of the building is comparatively not so large from a seismic design standpoint. The responses of the isolated structures reduce sufficiently and controled the motion of the building well in a practical range. By increasing the acceleration of the earthquake, the yielding of the farce was occurred in the concrete and steel frame, which shows the necessity of the exact nonlinear dynamic analysis.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.543-562
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• 2006

Base isolation technology has been accepted as a feasible and attractive way in improving seismic resistance of structures. The seismic design of new seismically isolated structures is mainly governed by the Uniform Building Code (UBC-97) published by the International Conference of Building Officials. In the UBC code, the distribution formula of the inertial (or lateral) forces leads to an inverted triangular shape in the vertical direction. It has been found to be too conservative for most isolated structures through experimental, computational and real earthquake examinations. In this paper, four simple and reasonable design formulae, based on the first mode of the base-isolated structures, for the lateral force distribution on isolated structures have been validated by a multiple-bay three-story base-isolated steel structure tested on the shaking table. Moreover, to obtain more accurate results for base-isolated structures in which higher mode contributions are more likely expected during earthquakes, another four inertial force distribution formulae are also proposed to include higher mode effects. Besides the experimental verification through shaking table tests, the vertical distributions of peak accelerations computed by the proposed design formulae are in good agreement with the recorded floor accelerations of the USC University Hospital during the Northridge earthquake.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.529-545
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• 2023

The coupled soil-pile-structure seismic response is recently in the spotlight of researchers because of its extensive applications in the different fields of engineering such as bridges, offshore platforms, wind turbines, and buildings. In this paper, a simple analytical model is developed to evaluate the dynamic performance of seismically isolated bridges considering triple interactions of soil, piles, and bridges simultaneously. Novel expressions are proposed to present the dynamic behavior of pile groups in inhomogeneous soils with various shear modulus along with depth. Both cohesive and cohesionless soil deposits can be simulated by this analytical model with a generalized function of varied shear modulus along the soil depth belonging to an inhomogeneous stratum. The methodology is discussed in detail and validated by rigorous dynamic solution of 3D continuum modeling, and time history analysis of centrifuge tests. The proposed analytical model accuracy is guaranteed by the acceptable agreement between the experimental/numerical and analytical results. A comparison of the proposed linear model results with nonlinear centrifuge tests showed that during moderate (frequent) earthquakes the relative differences in responses of the superstructure and the pile cap can be ignored. However, during strong excitations, the response calculated in the linear time history analysis is always lower than the real conditions with the nonlinear behavior of the soil-pile-bridge system. The current simple and efficient method provides the accuracy and the least computational costs in comparison to the full three-dimensional analyses.