• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제21권3호
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• pp.315-332
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• 2005

The Element-free Galerkin Method has become a very popular tool for the simulation of mechanical problems with moving boundaries. The internally applied Moving Least Squares interpolation uses in general Gaussian or cubic weighting functions and has compact support. Due to the approximative character of this interpolation the obtained shape functions do not fulfill the interpolation conditions, which causes additional numerical effort for the application of the boundary conditions. In this paper a new weighting function is presented, which was designed for meshless shape functions to fulfill these essential conditions with very high accuracy without any additional effort. Furthermore this interpolation gives much more stable results for varying size of the influence radius and for strongly distorted nodal arrangements than existing weighting function types.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제55권2호
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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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• 제31권5호
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• pp.621-624
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• 2009

The time delay in active and semi-active controls is an important research subject. Many researches on the time-delay control for deterministic systems have been made (Hu and Wang 2002, Yang et al. 1990, Abdel-Mooty and Roorda 1991, Pu 1998, Cai and Huang 2002), while the study on that for stochastic systems is very limited. The effects of the time delay on the control of nonlinear systems under Gaussian white noise excitations have been studied by Bilello et al. (2002). The controlled linear systems with deterministic and random time delay subjected to Gaussian white noise excitations have been treated by Grigoriu (1997). Recently, a stochastic averaging method for quasi-integrable Hamiltonian systems with time delay has been proposed (Liu and Zhu 2007). In the present paper, a stochastic optimal time-delay control method for stochastically excited nonlinear structural systems is proposed based on the stochastic averaging method for quasi Hamiltonian systems with time delay and the stochastic dynamical programming principle. An example of stochastically excited and controlled hysteretic column is given to illustrate the proposed control method.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제6권4호
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• pp.363-375
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• 1998

The stiffness matrix of a two-dimensional contact surface element is deduced from the principle of virtual work. The incremental loading procedure used is controlled by displacement and stress. Special potential contact elements are used to avoid the need to rearrange the FEM mesh due to variations of the contact surface as contact develops. Published results are used to validate the method, which is then applied to a turbine to solve the contact problem between the blade root and rotor in the region in which a 'push fit' connects the blade to its rotor.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.65-73
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• 2003

A higher level of engineering standard in the field of construction, is the use of prestressing in building structures. The concept of prestressing steel structures has only recently been widely considered, despite a long and successful history of prestressing concrete members. Several analytical studies of prestressed steel girders were reported in literatures, but much of the work was not studied with reference to the optimal design and behaviour of the prestressed steel plate girder. A plate girder prestressed eccentrically, will behave as a beam-column, which is subjected to axial compression and bending moment which will cause the beam to buckle out. The study of buckling of the prestressed steel plate girder is necessary for stability criteria. This paper deals with the stability of prestressed steel plate girder using concept of "Vlasov's Circle of Stability" under eccentric prestressing force.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.401-423
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• 2011

In this paper, a mesoscale model of concrete is presented, which considers particles, matrix material and the interfacial transition zone (ITZ) as separate constituents. Particles are represented as ellipsoides, generated according to a prescribed grading curve and placed randomly into the specimen. In this context, an efficient separation procedure is used. The nonlinear behavior is simulated with a cohesive interface model for the ITZ and a combined damage/plasticity model for the matrix material. The mesoscale model is used to simulate a compression and a tensile test. Furthermore, the influence of the particle distribution on the loaddisplacement curve is investigated.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제49권1호
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• pp.111-128
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• 2014

The stochastic response surface method (SRSM) and the response surface method (RSM) are often used for structural reliability analysis, especially for reliability problems with implicit performance functions. This paper aims to compare these two methods in terms of fitting the performance function, accuracy and efficiency in estimating probability of failure as well as statistical moments of system output response. The computational procedures of two response surface methods are briefly introduced first. Then their capabilities are demonstrated and compared in detail through two examples. The results indicate that the probability of failure mainly reflects the accuracy of the response surface function (RSF) fitting the performance function in the vicinity of the design point, while the statistical moments of system output response reflect the accuracy of the RSF fitting the performance function in the entire space. In addition, the performance function can be well fitted by the SRSM with an optimal order polynomial chaos expansion both in the entire physical and in the independent standard normal spaces. However, it can be only well fitted by the RSM in the vicinity of the design point. For reliability problems involving random variables with approximate normal distributions, such as normal, lognormal, and Gumbel Max distributions, both the probability of failure and statistical moments of system output response can be accurately estimated by the SRSM, whereas the RSM can only produce the probability of failure with a reasonable accuracy.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제32권5호
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• pp.609-620
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• 2009

In this paper the results of a series of experimental tests upon three-point bending specimens made of polystyrene and containing re-entrant corners are firstly described. Tests involved different notch angles, different notch depths and finally different sizes of the samples. All the specimens broke at the defect, as expected because of the material brittleness and, hence, the generalized stress intensity factor was expected to be the governing failure parameter. Recorded failure loads are then compared with the predictions provided by a fracture criterion recently introduced in the framework of Finite Fracture Mechanics: fracture is assumed to propagate by finite steps, whose length is determined by the contemporaneous fulfilment of energy balance and stress requirements. This fracture criterion allows us to achieve the expression of the generalized fracture toughness as a function of the tensile strength, the fracture toughness and the notch opening angle. Comparison between theoretical predictions and experimental data turns out to be more than satisfactory.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제63권6호
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• pp.825-835
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• 2017

Significant improvements to methodologies on structural damage detection (SDD) have emerged in recent years. However, many methods are related to inversion computation which is prone to be ill-posed or ill-conditioning, leading to low-computing efficiency or inaccurate results. To explore a more accurate solution with satisfactory efficiency, a PSO-INM algorithm, combining particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and an improved Nelder-Mead method (INM), is proposed to solve multi-sample objective function defined based on Bayesian inference in this study. The PSO-based algorithm, as a heuristic algorithm, is reliable to explore solution to SDD problem converted into a constrained optimization problem in mathematics. And the multi-sample objective function provides a stable pattern under different level of noise. Advantages of multi-sample objective function and its superior over traditional objective function are studied. Numerical simulation results of a two-storey frame structure show that the proposed method is sensitive to multi-damage cases. For further confirming accuracy of the proposed method, the ASCE 4-storey benchmark frame structure subjected to single and multiple damage cases is employed. Different kinds of modal identification methods are utilized to extract structural modal data from noise-contaminating acceleration responses. The illustrated results show that the proposed method is efficient to exact locations and extents of induced damages in structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제32권1호
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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.