• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.735-753
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• 2013

The wind load is always the dominant load of cooling tower due to its large size, complex geometry and thin-wall structure. At present, when computing the wind-induced response of the large-scale cooling tower, the wind pressure distribution is obtained based on code regulations, wind tunnel test or computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis, and then is imposed on the tower structure. However, such method fails to consider the change of the wind load with the deformation of cooling tower, which may result in error of the wind load. In this paper, the analysis of the large cooling tower based on the iterative method for wind pressure is studied, in which the advantages of CFD and finite element method (FEM) are combined in order to improve the accuracy. The comparative study of the results obtained from the code regulations and iterative method is conducted. The results show that with the increase of the mean wind speed, the difference between the methods becomes bigger. On the other hand, based on the design of experiment (DOE), an approximate model is built for the optimal design of the large-scale cooling tower by a two-level optimization strategy, which makes use of code-based design method and the proposed iterative method. The results of the numerical example demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.277-284
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• 2006

In order to ensure the structural integrity of nuclear welded structures during design life, the fatigue life has to be evaluated by fatigue analysis procedures presented in technical codes such as ASME B&PV Code Section III. However, existing fatigue analysis procedures do not explicitly consider the presence of welded joints. A new fatigue analysis procedure based on a structural stress/fracture mechanics approach has been recently developed in order to reduce conservatism by erasing uncertainty in the analysis procedure. A recent review of fatigue crack growth data under various mean loading conditions using the structural stress/fracture mechanics approach, does not consider the mean loading effect, revealed some significant discrepancies in fatigue crack growth curves according to the mean loading conditions. In this paper, we propose the use of the stress intensity factor range ${\Delta}K$ characterized with loading ratio R effects in terms of the structural stress. We demonstrate the effectiveness in characterizing fatigue crack growth and S-N behavior using the well-known data. It was identified that the S-N data under high mean loading could be consolidated in a master S-N curve for welded joints.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.781-784
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• 2009

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.785-788
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• 2009

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.263-280
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• 2015

This paper describes a study of the collision of hard steel spheres against aluminium thin circular plates at speeds up to 140 m/s. The tests were monitored by a high speed camera and a chronoscope, which allowed the determination of the ballistic limit and the plate deformation pattern. Quasi-static material parameters were obtained from tests on a universal testing machine and dynamic mechanical characterization of two aluminium alloys were conducted in a split Hopkinson pressure bar. Using a damage model, the perforation of the plates was simulated by finite element analysis. Axisymmetric, shell and solid elements were employed with various parameters of the numerical analysis being thoroughly discussed, in special, the dynamic model parameters. A good agreement between experiments and the numerical analysis was obtained.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.71 no.5
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• pp.545-552
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• 2019

The analysis and design of complex structures like sandwich-panel elements are difficult; the use of finite element method for the analysis is complicated and time consuming when non-linear effects are considered. On the other hand, artificial neural network (ANN) models can capture the non-linear effects and its application requires lesser computational demand. Two ANN models were trained, tested and validated to compute the force for a given displacement of a sandwich-type roof element; 2555 force and element deformation pairs were used for training the ANN models. For the models trained without considering the damping effect, there were two values in the input layer: maximum displacement and current displacement, and for the model considering damping, displacement from the previous step was used as an additional input. Totally, 400 ANN models were trained. Results show that there is a good agreement between the experimental and simulated data, and the models showed a good performance with a mean square error value of 4548.85. Both the ANN models could simulate the inelastic behaviour, loss of rigidity, and evolution of permanent displacements. The models could also interpolate and extrapolate, which enables them to be used as an analysis and design tool for such complex elements.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.75 no.4
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• pp.477-485
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• 2020

Finite element (FE) model based structural damage detection (SDD) methods play vital roles in effectively locating and quantifying structural damages. Among these methods, structural model updating should be conducted before SDD to obtain benchmark models of real structures. However, the characteristics of updating parameters are not reasonably considered in existing studies. Inspired by the l_∞ norm regularization, a novel anti-sparse representation method is proposed for structural model updating in this study. Based on sensitivity analysis, both frequencies and mode shapes are used to define an objective function at first. Then, by adding l_∞ norm penalty, an optimization problem is established for structural model updating. As a result, the optimization problem can be solved by the fast iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (FISTA). Moreover, comparative studies with classical regularization strategy, i.e. the l₂ norm regularization method, are conducted as well. To intuitively illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a 2-DOF spring-mass model is taken as an example in numerical simulations. The updating results show that the proposed method has a good robustness to measurement noises. Finally, to further verify the applicability of the proposed method, a six-storey aluminum alloy frame is designed and fabricated in laboratory. The added mass on each storey is taken as updating parameter. The updating results provide a good agreement with the true values, which indicates that the proposed method can effectively update the model parameters with a high accuracy.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.115-124
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• 1998

A novel boundary stress resolution method is suggested in this paper, which is based upon the displacements of finite element analysis and of high precision with stress boundary condition strictly satisfied. The method is used to modify the Zienkiewicz-Zhu ($Z^2$) a posteriori error estimator and for the h-version adaptive finite element analysis of crack problems. Successful results are obtained.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.311-330
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• 2007

Model-based predictions of structural behavior are negatively affected by uncertainties of various type and in various stages of the structural analysis. The present paper focusses on dynamic analysis and addresses the effects of uncertainties concerning material and geometric parameters, mainly in the context of modal analysis of large-scale structures. Given the large number of uncertain parameters arising in this case, highly scalable simulation-based methods are adopted, which can deal with possibly thousands of uncertain parameters. In order to solve the reliability problem, i.e., the estimation of very small exceedance probabilities, an advanced simulation method called Line Sampling is used. In combination with an efficient algorithm for the estimation of the most important uncertain parameters, the method provides good estimates of the failure probability and enables one to quantify the error in the estimate. Another aspect here considered is the uncertainty quantification for closely-spaced eigenfrequencies. The solution here adopted represents each eigenfrequency as a weighted superposition of the full set of eigenfrequencies. In a case study performed with the FE model of a satellite it is shown that the effects of uncertain parameters can be very different in magnitude, depending on the considered response quantity. In particular, the uncertainty in the quantities of interest (eigenfrequencies) turns out to be mainly caused by very few of the uncertain parameters, which results in sharp estimates of the failure probabilities at low computational cost.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.462-465
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• 1996