• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.263-275
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• 2014

The development of transportation in large cities requires the construction of twin tunnels located at shallow depth. As far as twin tunnels excavated in parallel are concerned, most of the cases reported in literature focused on considering the effect of the ground condition, tunnel size, depth, surface loads, the relative position between two tunnels, and construction process on the structural lining forces. However, the effect of the segment joints was not taken into account. Numerical investigation performed in this study using the $FLAC^{3D}$ finite difference element program made it possible to include considerable influences of the segment joints and tunnel distance on the structural lining forces induced in twin tunnels. The structural lining forces induced in the first tunnel through various phases are considerably affected by the second tunnel construction process. Their values induced in a segmental lining are always lower than those obtained in a continuous lining. However, the influence of joint distribution in the second tunnel on the structural forces induced in the first tunnel is insignificant. The critical influence distance between two tunnels is about two tunnel diameters.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.73-93
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• 2012

With an active structural involvement in spiral case structure (SCS) that is always the design and research focus of hydroelectric power plant (HPP), the compressible membrane sandwiched between steel spiral case and surrounding reinforced concrete was often assumed to be linear elastic material in conventional design analysis of SCS. Unfortunately considerable previous studies have proved that the foam material serving as membrane exhibits essentially nonlinear mechanical behavior. In order to clarify the effect of membrane (foam) material's nonlinear stress-strain behavior on SCS, this work performed a case study on SCS with a compressible membrane using the ABAQUS code after a sound calibration of the employed constitutive model describing foam material. In view of the successful capture of fitted stress-strain curve of test by the FEM program, we recommend an application and dissemination of the simulation technique employed in this work for membrane material description to structural designers of SCS. Even more important, the case study argues that taking into account the nonlinear stress-strain response of membrane material in loading process is definitely essential. However, we hold it unnecessary to consider the membrane material's hysteresis and additionally, employment of nonlinear elastic model for membrane material description is adequate to the structural design of SCS. Understanding and accepting these concepts will help to analyze and predict the structural performance of SCS more accurately in design effort.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.729-741
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• 1997

Cracked reinforced concrete in compression has been observed to exhibit lower strength and stiffness than uniaxially compressed concrete. The so-called compression softening effect responsible is thought to be related to the degree of transverse cracking and straining present. It significantly affects the strength, ductility and load-deformation response of a concrete element. A number of experimental investigations have been undertaken to determine the degree of softening that occurs, and the factors that affect it. At the same time, a number of diverse analytical models have been proposed by various this behavior. In this paper, the softened truss model thoery for low-rise structural shearwalls is employed using the principle of the stress and strain transformations. Using this theory the softening parameters for the concrete struts proposed by Hsu and Belarbi as well as by Vecchio and Collins are examined by 51 test shearwalls available in literature. It is found that the experimental shear strengths and ductilities of the walls under static loads are, in average, very close to the theoretical values; however, the experiment shear strengths and ductilities of the walls under dynamic loads with a low (0.2 Hz) frequency are generally less than the theoretical values.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.121-133
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• 1995

It is well known that two-dimensional simplified third-order theories satisfy the layer interface continuity of transverse shear strains, thus these theories violate the continuity of transverse shear stresses when two consecutive layers differ either in fibre orientation or material. The third-order theories considered herein involve four/or five dependent unknowns in the displacement field and satisfy the condition of vanishing of transverse shear stresses at the bounding planes of the plate. The objective of this investigation is to examine (i) the flexural response prediction accuracy of these third-order theories compared to exact elasticity solution (ii) the effect of layer interface continuity conditions on the flexural response. To investigate the effect of layer interface continuity conditions, three-dimensional elasticity solutions are developed by enforcing the continuity of different combinations of transverse stresses and/or strains at the layer interfaces. Three dimensional twenty node solid finite element (having three translational displacements as degrees of freedom) without the imposition of any of the conditions on the transverse stresses and strains is also employed for the flexural analysis of the laminated plates for the purposes of comparison with the above theories. These shear deformation theories and elasticity approaches in terms of accuracy, adequacy and applicability are examined through extensive numerical examples.

• Biomaterials and Biomechanics in Bioengineering
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.9-20
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• 2019

Living beings are formed of advanced biological and mechanical systems which exist for millions of years. It is known that various animals and insects right from small ants to huge whales have different weight carrying capacities, which is generally expressed as a ratio of their own bodyweights i.e., Strength to Bodyweight Ratio (SBR). The puzzle is that when a rhinoceros beetle (scientific name: Dynastinae) can carry 850 times its own bodyweight, why a man cannot accomplish the same feat. There are intrinsic biological and mechanical reasons related to their capacities, as per biomechanics. Yet, there are underlining principles of engineering and structural mechanics which tend to solve this puzzle. The paper attempts to give a plausible answer for this puzzle through structural mechanics and experimental modeling techniques. It is based on the fact that smaller an animal or creature, it has larger value of weight lifting by self-weight ratio. The simple example of steel prism model discussed in this paper, show that smaller the physical model size, larger is its SBR value. To normalize this, the basic length of the model need to be considered and when multiplied with SBR, a constant is arrived. Hence, the aim of the research presented is to derive this constant on a pan-living being spectrum through size/scaling effect.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.131-141
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• 2019

Structural control systems have uncertainties in their structural parameters and control devices which by using reliability analysis, uncertainty can be modeled. In this paper, reliability of controlled structures equipped with semi-active Magneto-Rheological (MR) dampers is investigated. For this purpose, at first, the effect of the structural parameters and damper parameters on the reliability of the seismic responses are evaluated. Then, the reliability of MR damper force is considered for expected levels of performance. For sensitivity analysis of the parameters exist in Bouc- Wen model for predicting the damper force, the importance vector is utilized. The improved first-order reliability method (FORM), is used to reliability analysis. As a case study, an 11-story shear building equipped with 3 MR dampers is selected and numerically obtained experimental data of a 1000 kN MR damper is assumed to study the reliability of the MR damper performance for expected levels. The results show that the standard deviation of random variables affects structural reliability as an uncertainty factor. Thus, the effect of uncertainty existed in the structural model parameters on the reliability of the structure is more than the uncertainty in the damper parameters. Also, the reliability analysis of the MR damper performance show that to achieve the highest levels of nominal capacity of the damper, the probability of failure is greatly increased. Furthermore, by using sensitivity analysis, the Bouc-Wen model parameters which have great importance in predicting damper force can be identified.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.461-469
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• 2011

In this study, the effect of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber volume fraction on the pullout behavior of structural synthetic fiber in hybrid structural synthetic fiber and PVA fiber cement composites are presented. Pullout behavior of the hybrid fiber cement composites and structural synthetic fiber were determined by dog-bone bond tests. Test results found that the addition of PVA fiber can effectively enhance the structural synthetic fiber cement based composites pullout behavior, especially in fiber interface toughness. Pullout test results of the structural synthetic fiber showed the interface toughness between structural synthetic fiber and PVA fiber reinforced cement composites increases with the volume fraction of PVA fiber. The microstructural observation confirms the incorporation of PVA fiber can effectively enhance the interface toughness mechanism of structural synthetic fiber and PVA fiber reinforced cement composites.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.40-49
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• 2013

This study purposed to investigate the optimal outrigger location in tall building with cap truss after a structural schematic design of 80 stories building was performed by using MIDAS-Gen. In this paper, the main parameters of structural analysis were the outrigger location and stiffness of main structural elements (outrigger, exterior column, shear wall etc). In order to search the optimal outrigger position in high-rise building with cap truss, we analysed and examined the lateral displacement of top floor which is one of the very important considering factors of tall building structural design. The paper results indicated that the outrigger location and the stiffness of main structural elements such as outrigger, exterior column and shear wall had an effect on the optimal outrigger location. And it is verified that the study results provided the basic engineering data for fixing the most optimal outrigger location for minimizing the lateral displacement of tall building.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.109-124
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• 2020

Benefiting from the massive monitoring data collected by the Structural health monitoring (SHM) system, scholars can grasp the complex environmental effects and structural state during structure operation. However, the monitoring data is often missing due to sensor faults and other reasons. It is necessary to study the recovery method of missing monitoring data. Taking the structural temperature monitoring data of Nanjing Dashengguan Yangtze River Bridge as an example, the long short-term memory (LSTM) network-based recovery method for missing structural temperature data is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the prediction results of temperature data using LSTM network, support vector machine (SVM), and wavelet neural network (WNN) are compared to verify the accuracy advantage of LSTM network in predicting time series data (such as structural temperature). Secondly, the application of LSTM network in the recovery of missing structural temperature data is discussed in detail. The results show that: the LSTM network can effectively recover the missing structural temperature data; incorporating more intact sensor data as input will further improve the recovery effect of missing data; selecting the sensor data which has a higher correlation coefficient with the data we want to recover as the input can achieve higher accuracy.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.814-820
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• 2011

It takes long time in numerical simulation because structural design for tire requires the nonlinear material property. Neural networks has been widely studied to engineering design to reduce numerical computation time. The numbers of hidden layer, hidden layer neuron and training data have been considered as the structural design variables of neural networks. In application of neural networks to optimize design, there are a few studies about arrangement method of input layer neurons. To investigate the effect of input layer neuron arrangement on neural networks, the variables of tire contour design and tension in bead area were assigned to inputs and output for neural networks respectively. Design variables arrangement in input layer were determined by main effect analysis. The number of hidden layer, the number of hidden layer neuron and the number of training data and so on have been considered as the structural design variables of neural networks. In application to optimization design problem of neural networks, there are few studies about arrangement method of input layer neurons. To investigate the effect of arrangement of input neurons on neural network learning tire contour design parameters and tension in bead area were assigned to neural input and output respectively. Design variables arrangement in input layer was determined by main effect analysis.