• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.237-240
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• 2008

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.273-285
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• 2012

Structural reanalysis is frequently used to reduce the computational cost during the process of design or optimization. The supports can be regarded as the design variables in various types of structural optimization problems. The location, number, and type of supports may be varied in order to yield a more effective design. The paper is focused on structural static reanalysis problem with added supports where some node displacements along axes of the global coordinate system are specified. A new approach is proposed and exact solutions can be provided by the approach. Thus, it belongs to the direct reanalysis methods. The information from the initial analysis has been fully exploited. Numerical examples show that the exact results can be achieved and the computational time can be significantly reduced by the proposed method.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.52 no.6
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• pp.1193-1208
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• 2014

A simulation of failures on responsible elements is only one form of the extreme structural behavior analysis. By understanding the dynamic behavior in incidental situations, it is possible to make a special structural design from the point of the largest axial force, stress and redundancy. The numerical realization of one such simulation analysis was performed using FEM in this paper. The boundary parameters of transient analysis, such as overall structural damping coefficient, load accelerations, time of load fall and internal forces in the responsible structural elements, were determined on the basis of the dynamic experimental parameters. The structure eigenfrequencies were determined in modal analysis. In the study, the basic incidental models were set. The models were identified by many years of monitoring incidental situations and the most frequent human errors in work with heavy structures. The combined load models of structure are defined in the paper since the incidents simply arise as consequences of cumulative errors and failures. A feature of a combined model is that the single incident causes the next incident (consecutive timing) as well as that other simple dynamic actions are simultaneous. The structure was observed in three typical load positions taken from the crane passport (range-load). The obtained dynamic responses indicate the degree of structural sensitivity depending on the character of incident. The dynamic coefficient KD was adopted as a parameter for the evaluation of structural sensitivity.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.595-611
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• 2013

This paper aims to compare three collocation point methods associated with the odd order stochastic response surface method (SRSM) in a systematical and quantitative way. The SRSM with the Hermite polynomial chaos is briefly introduced first. Then, three collocation point methods, namely the point method, the root method and the without origin method underlying the odd order SRSMs are highlighted. Three examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the three methods. The results indicate that the condition that the Hermite polynomial information matrix evaluated at the collocation points has a full rank should be satisfied to yield reliability results with a sufficient accuracy. The point method and the without origin method are much more efficient than the root method, especially for the reliability problems involving a large number of random variables or requiring complex finite element analysis. The without origin method can also produce sufficiently accurate reliability results in comparison with the point and root methods. Therefore, the origin often used as a collocation point is not absolutely necessary. The odd order SRSMs with the point method and the without origin method are recommended for the reliability analysis due to their computational accuracy and efficiency. The order of SRSM has a significant influence on the results associated with the three collocation point methods. For normal random variables, the SRSM with an order equaling or exceeding the order of a performance function can produce reliability results with a sufficient accuracy. The order of SRSM should significantly exceed the order of the performance function involving strongly non-normal random variables.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.95-126
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• 2009

The present contribution addresses the parallelization of advanced simulation methods for structural reliability analysis, which have recently been developed for large-scale structures with a high number of uncertain parameters. In particular, the Line Sampling method and the Subset Simulation method are considered. The proposed parallel algorithms exploit the parallelism associated with the possibility to simultaneously perform independent FE analyses. For the Line Sampling method a parallelization scheme is proposed both for the actual sampling process, and for the statistical gradient estimation method used to identify the so-called important direction of the Line Sampling scheme. Two parallelization strategies are investigated for the Subset Simulation method: the first one consists in the embarrassingly parallel advancement of distinct Markov chains; in this case the speedup is bounded by the number of chains advanced simultaneously. The second parallel Subset Simulation algorithm utilizes the concept of speculative computing. Speedup measurements in context with the FE model of a multistory building (24,000 DOFs) show the reduction of the wall-clock time to a very viable amount (<10 minutes for Line Sampling and ${\approx}$ 1 hour for Subset Simulation). The measurements, conducted on clusters of multi-core nodes, also indicate a strong sensitivity of the parallel performance to the load level of the nodes, in terms of the number of simultaneously used cores. This performance degradation is related to memory bottlenecks during the modal analysis required during each FE analysis.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.19-35
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• 2010

This paper proposes a hybrid heuristic and criteria-based method of optimum design which combines the advantages of both the iterated simulated annealing (SA) algorithm and the rigorously derived optimality criteria (OC) for structural optimum design of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings under multi-load cases based on the current Chinese design codes. The entire optimum design procedure is divided into two parts: strength optimum design and stiffness optimum design. A modified SA with the strategy of adaptive feasible region is proposed to perform the discrete optimization of RC frame structures under the strength constraints. The optimum stiffness design is conducted using OC method with the optimum results of strength optimum design as the lower bounds of member size. The proposed method is integrated into the commercial software packages for building structural design, SATWE, and for finite element analysis, ANSYS, for practical applications. Finally, two practical frame-shear-wall structures (15-story and 30-story) are optimized to illustrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed optimum design method.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.201-217
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• 2007

A harmonic type differential quadrature approach for nonlinear dynamic analysis of multi-degree-of-freedom systems has been developed. A series of numerical examples is conducted to assess the performance of the HDQ method in linear and nonlinear dynamic analysis problems. Results are compared with the existing solutions available from other analytical and numerical methods. In all cases, the results obtained are quite accurate.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 1991.10a
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• pp.115-120
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• 1991

At the preliminary design stage, the orientations of laminae in a laminate are not known. This fact discourages the most of engineers from the beginning. If the quasi-isotropic constants are used, it halps the design engineer greatly to start his work. If conventional mechanics and elasticity theories can be used, the effort for design and analysis is greatly reduced. This paper reports the possibility of using the classical mechanics at the preliminary design stage for the laminated composite primary structure for civil construction. The result is quite promissing.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.62 no.1
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• pp.85-95
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• 2017

This paper presents an explicit analytical iteration method for form-finding analysis of suspension bridges. By extending the conventional analytical form-finding method predicated on the elastic catenary theory, two nonlinear governing equations are derived for calculating the accurate unstrained lengths of the entire cable systems both the main cable and the hangers. And for the gradient-based iteration method, the derivation of explicit calculation for the Jacobian matrix while solving the nonlinear governing equation enhances the computational efficiency. The results from sensitivity analysis show well performance of the explicit Jacobian matrix compared with the traditional finite difference method. According to two numerical examples of long span suspension bridges studied, the proposed method is also compared with those reported approaches or the fundamental criterions in suspension bridge structural analysis, which eventually confirms the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach.

• Interaction and multiscale mechanics
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.369-379
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• 2008

A combined stochastic diffusion and mean-field model is developed for a systematic study of the grain growth in a pure single-phase polycrystalline material. A corresponding Fokker-Planck continuity equation is formulated, and the interplay/competition of stochastic and curvature-driven mechanisms is investigated. Finite difference results show that the stochastic diffusion coefficient has a strong effect on the growth of small grains in the early stage in both two-dimensional columnar and three-dimensional grain systems, and the corresponding growth exponents are ~0.33 and ~0.25, respectively. With the increase in grain size, the deterministic curvature-driven mechanism becomes dominant and the growth exponent is close to 0.5. The transition ranges between these two mechanisms are about 2-26 and 2-15 nm with boundary energy of 0.01-1 J $m^{-2}$ in two- and three-dimensional systems, respectively. The grain size distribution of a three-dimensional system changes dramatically with increasing time, while it changes a little in a two-dimensional system. The grain size distribution from the combined model is consistent with experimental data available.