• Architectural research
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.31-37
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• 2007

This study presents the so-called Modified Allowable Stress Design (MASD) method for structural designs. The objective of this study is to qualitatively estimate uncertainties of tensile steel member's cross-sectional structural designs and find the optimal resulting design which can resist all uncertainty cases. The design parameters are assumed to be interval associated with lower and upper bounds and consequently interval methods are implemented to non-stochastically produce design results including the structural uncertainties. By seeking optimal uncertainty combinations among interval parameters, engineers can qualitatively describe uncertain design solutions which were not considered in conventional structural designs. Under the assumption that structures have basically uncertainties like displacement responses, the safety range of resulting designs is represented by lower and upper bounds depending on given tolerance error and structural parameters. As a numerical example uncertain cross-sectional areas of members that can resist applied loads are investigated and it demonstrates that the present design method is superior to conventional allowable stress designs (ASD) with respect to a reliably structural safety as well as an economical material.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.433-445
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• 2013

Vibration-based structural identification has become an important tool for structural health monitoring and safety evaluation. However, various kinds of uncertainties (e.g., observation noise) involved in the field test data obstruct automation system identification for accurate and fast structural safety evaluation. A practical way including a data preprocessing procedure and a vector backward auto-regressive (VBAR) method has been investigated for practical bridge identification. The data preprocessing procedure serves to improve the data quality, which consists of multi-level uncertainty mitigation techniques. The VBAR method provides a determinative way to automatically distinguish structural modes from extraneous modes arising from uncertainty. Ambient test data of a cantilever beam is investigated to demonstrate how the proposed method automatically interprets vibration data for structural modal estimation. Especially, structural identification of a truss bridge using field test data is also performed to study the effectiveness of the proposed method for real bridge identification.

• 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.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.19-43
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• 2014

A risk assessment framework for evaluating building structures is implemented in this study. This framework allows considering sources of uncertainty both on structural capacity and seismic demand. In particular randomness on seismic load, incident angle, material properties, floor mass and structural damping are considered; in addition the choice of fibre modelling versus plastic hinge model is also considered as a source of uncertainty. The main objective of this work is to study the contribution of these sources of uncertainty on the fragilities of steel and steel-reinforced concrete composite 3D building structures. The fragility curves are expressed in the form of a two-parameter lognormal distribution where vertical statistics in conjunction with metaheuristic optimization are implemented for calculating the two parameters.

• International journal of steel structures
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1607-1616
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• 2018

Quantitatively modeling and propagating all sources of uncertainty stand at the core of seismic fragility assessment of structures. This paper investigates the effects of various sources of uncertainty on seismic responses and seismic fragility estimates of single-layer reticulated domes. Sensitivity analyses are performed to examine the sensitivity of typical seismic responses to uncertainties in structural modeling parameters, and the results suggest that the variability in structural damping, yielding strength, steel ultimate strain, dead load and snow load has significant effects on the seismic responses, and these five parameters should be taken as random variables in the seismic fragility assessment. Based on this, fragility estimates and fragility curves incorporating different levels of uncertainty are obtained on the basis of the results of incremental dynamic analyses on the corresponding set of 40 sample models generated by Latin Hypercube Sampling method. The comparisons of these fragility curves illustrate that, the inclusion of only ground motion uncertainty is inappropriate and inadequate, and the appropriate way is incorporating the variability in the five identified structural modeling parameters as well into the seismic fragility assessment of single-layer reticulated domes.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.62 no.6
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• pp.703-708
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• 2017

The goal of this study is to evaluate behavior uncertainties of structures by using interval finite element analysis based on interval factor method as a specific non-stochastic tool. The interval finite element method, i.e., interval FEM, is a finite element method that uses interval parameters in situations where it is not possible to get reliable probabilistic characteristics of the structure. The present method solves the uncertainty problems of a 2D solid structure, in which structural characteristics are assumed to be represented as interval parameters. An interval analysis method using interval factors is applied to obtain the solution. Numerical applications verify the intuitive effectiveness of the present method to investigate structural uncertainties such as displacement and stress without the application of probability theory.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.311-318
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• 2020

The goal of this study is to analytically and non-stochastically generate structural uncertainty behaviors of isotropic beams and laminated composite plates under plane stress conditions by using an interval finite element method. Uncertainty parameters of structural properties considering resistance and load effect are formulated by interval arithmetic and then linked to the finite element method. Under plane stress state, the isotropic cantilever beam is modeled and the laminated composite plate is cross-ply lay-up [0/90]. Triangular shape with a clamped-free boundary condition is given as geometry. Through uncertainties of both Young's modulus for resistance and applied forces for load effect, the change of structural maximum deflection and maximum von-Mises stress are analyzed. Numerical applications verify the effective generation of structural behavior uncertainties through the non-stochastic approach using interval arithmetic and immediately the feasibility of the present method.

• 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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.321-336
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• 2022

Model uncertainty is a key factor that could influence the accuracy and reliability of numerical model-based analysis. It is necessary to acquire an appropriate updating approach which could search and determine the realistic model parameter values from measurements. In this paper, the Bayesian model updating theory combined with the transitional Markov chain Monte Carlo (TMCMC) method and K-means cluster analysis is utilized in the updating of the structural model parameters. Kriging and polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) are employed to generate surrogate models to reduce the computational burden in TMCMC. The selected updating approaches are applied to three structural examples with different complexity, including a two-storey frame, a ten-storey frame, and the national stadium model. These models stand for the low-dimensional linear model, the high-dimensional linear model, and the nonlinear model, respectively. The performances of updating in these three models are assessed in terms of the prediction uncertainty, numerical efforts, and prior information. This study also investigates the updating scenarios using the analytical approach and surrogate models. The uncertainty quantification in the Bayesian approach is further discussed to verify the validity and accuracy of the surrogate models. Finally, the advantages and limitations of the surrogate model-based updating approaches are discussed for different structural complexity. The possibility of utilizing the boosting algorithm as an ensemble learning method for improving the surrogate models is also presented.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.5
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• pp.577-591
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• 2022

This paper develops a comparatively time-efficient methodology for performing seismic fragility analysis of the reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in the presence of uncertainty sources. It aims to appraise the effectiveness of any variation in the material's mechanical properties as epistemic uncertainty, and the record-to-record variation as aleatory uncertainty in structural response. In this respect, the fuzzy set theory, a well-known 𝛼-cut approach, and the Genetic Algorithm (GA) assess the median of collapse fragility curves as a fuzzy response. GA is requisite for searching the maxima and minima of the objective function (median fragility herein) in each membership degree, 𝛼. As this is a complicated and time-consuming process, the authors propose utilizing the Gene Expression Programming-based (GEP-based) equation for reducing the computational analysis time of the case study building significantly. The results indicate that the proposed structural analysis algorithm on the derived GEP model is able to compute the fuzzy median fragility about 33.3% faster, with errors less than 1%.