• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.249-262
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• 2019

In this study, high strength aluminum alloys (AA) plates are proposed as a new construction material for strengthening reinforced concrete (RC) beams. The purpose of this investigation is to evaluate AA plate's suitability as externally bonded reinforcing (EBR) materials for retrofitting shear deficient beams. A total of twenty RC beams designed to fail in shear were strengthened with different spacing and orientations. The specimens were loaded with four-points loading till failure. The considered outcome parameters included load carrying capacity, deflection, strain in plates, and failure modes. The results of all tested beams showed an increase up to 37% in the load carrying capacity and also an increase in deflection compared to the control un-strengthened beams. This demonstrated the potential of adopting AA plates as EBR material. Finally, the shear contribution from the AA plates was predicted using the models available in the ACI440-08, TR55 and FIB14 design code for fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) plates. The predicted results were compared to experimental testing data with the ratio of the experimentally measured ultimate load to predicted load, range on the average, between 93% and 97%.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.72 no.4
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• pp.479-489
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• 2019

The corrosion of reinforcement leads to a gradual decay of structural strength and durability. Several models for crack occurrence prediction and crack width propagation are investigated in this paper. Analytical and experimental models were used to predict the bond strength in the period of corrosion propagation. The manner of flexural strength loss is calculated by application of these models for different scenarios. As a new approach, the variation of the concrete beam neutral axis height has been evaluated, which shows a reduction in the neutral axis height for the scenarios without loss of bond. Alternatively, an increase of the neutral axis height was observed for the scenarios including bond and concrete section loss. The statistical properties of the parameters influencing the strength have been deliberated associated with obtaining the time-dependent bending strength during corrosion propagation, using Monte Carlo (MC) random sampling method. Results showed that the ultimate strain in concrete decreases significantly as a consequence of the bond strength reduction during the corrosion process, when the section reaches to its final limit. Therefore, such sections are likely to show brittle behavior.

• 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.

• Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
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• v.46 no.9
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• pp.563-571
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• 2008

The influence of annealing treatment on dynamic deformation behavior of ultra-fine grained aluminum alloys was investigated in this study. After equal-channel angular pressing at $200^{\circ}C$, most of the grains were considerably reduced to nearly equiaxed grains of $0.3{\mu}m$ in size. With an increment of various annealing treatments for 1 hour, resultant microstructures were found to be fairly stable at temperatures up to $200^{\circ}C$, suggesting that static recovery would be dominantly operative, whereas grain growth was pronounced above $250^{\circ}C$. The tensile test results showed that yield and ultimate tensile strengths decreased, but elongation-to-failure and strain hardening rate increased with increasing annealing temperature. The dynamic deformation behavior retrieved with a series of torsional tests was explored with respect to annealed microstructures. Such mechanical response was analyzed in relation to resultant microstructure and fracture mode.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.77 no.5
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• pp.637-650
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• 2021

The paper presents an investigation of the widely varying mechanical performance and behaviour of steel and Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) reinforced concrete beams using non-destructive techniques of Acoustic Emission (AE) and Digital Image Correlation (DIC) under four-point bending. Laboratory experiments are performed on both differently reinforced concrete beams with 0.33%, 0.52% and 1.11% of tension reinforcement against balanced section. The results show that the ultimate load-carrying capacity increases with an increase in tensile reinforcement in both cases. In addition to that, AE waveform parameters of amplitude and number of AE hits successfully correlates and picks up the divergent mechanism of cracking initiation and progression of failure in steel reinforced and GFRP reinforced concrete beams. AE activity is about 20-30% more in GFRP-RC beams as compared to steel-RC beams. It was primarily due to the lower modulus of elasticity of GFRP bars leading to much larger ductility and deflections as compared to steel-RC beams. Furthermore, AE XY event plots and longitudinal strain profiles using DIC gives an online and real-time visual display of progressive AE activity and strains respectively to efficaciously depict the crack evolution and their advancement in steel-RC and GFRP-RC beams which show a close matching with the micro-and macro-cracks visually observed in the actual beams at various stages of loading.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.653-671
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• 2023

In practice, the interference influence caused by adjacent footings of structures on geo-reinforced loose soil has a considerable impact on their behavior. Thus, the goal of this study is to evaluate the behavior of two strip footings in close proximity on both geocell and geogrid reinforced soil with different reinforcement layers. Geocell was made from geogrid material used to compare the performance of cellular and planar reinforcement on the bearing pressure of twin footings. Extensive experimental tests have been performed to attain the optimum embedment depth and vertical distance between reinforcement layers. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) analysis has been conducted to monitor the deformation, tilting and movement of soil particles beneath and between twin footings. Results of tests and PIV technique were verified using finite element modeling (FEM) and the results of both PIV and FEM were used to utilize failure mechanisms and influenced shear strain around the loading region. The results show that the performance of twin footings on geocell-reinforced sand at allowable and ultimate settlement ranges are almost 4% and 25% greater than the same twin footings on the same geogrid-reinforced sand, respectively. By increasing the distance between twin footings, soil particle displacements become smaller than the settlement of the foundations.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.5
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• pp.575-590
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• 2022

In this paper, bond-slip behavior of high strength concrete filled circular steel tube (HSCFCST) after elevated temperatures treatment was studied. 17 specimens were designed for push-out test. The influence was discussed as following parameters: (a) concrete strength, (b) constant temperature, and (c) bond length. The results showed that (1) after elevated temperatures treatment, the bond strength of the HSCFCST specimens increased first and then decreased with temperature rising; (2) the bond strength increased with the increase of concrete strength at room temperature, while the influence subsided after elevated temperatures treatment; (3) the strain of the circular steel tube was distributed exponentially along its length, the stress changed from exponential distribution to uniform distribution with the increase of load; (4) the bond damage process was postponed with the increase of constant temperature; and (5) the energy consumption capacity of the bonding interface increased with the rise of concrete strength and constant temperature. Moreover, computational formulas of ultimate and residual bond strength were obtained by regression, and the bond-slip constitutive models of HSCFCSTs after elevated temperatures was established.

• Corrosion Science and Technology
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.232-241
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• 2023

The mechanical properties of the hydrogen valve responsible for supplying and blocking hydrogen gas in a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) were researched. Mechanical properties by hydrogen embrittlement were investigated by coating chromium nitride (CrN) and titanium nitride (TiN) on aluminum alloy by arc ion plating method. The coating layer was deposited to a thickness of about 2 ㎛, and a slow strain rate test (SSRT) was conducted after hydrogen embrittlement to determine the hydrogen embrittlement resistance of the CrN and TiN coating layers. The CrN-coated specimen presented little decrease in mechanical properties until 12 hours of hydrogen charging due to its excellent resistance to hydrogen permeation. However, both the CrN and TiN-coated specimens exhibited deterioration in mechanical properties due to the peeling of the coating layer after 24 hours of hydrogen charging. The specimens coated at 350 ℃ presented a significant decrease in ultimate tensile strength due to abnormal grain growth.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.405-421
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• 2023

An experimental study on six axially-loaded composite short columns with different thicknesses of steel tube and that of the concrete plate was carried out. Compared to the mechanical behavior of component specimens under axially compressed, the failure modes, compression deformation, and strain process were obtained. The two main parameters that have a significant enhancement to cross-sectional strength were also analyzed. The failure of an axially loaded UHPC-CFST short column is due to the crushing of the UHPC plate, while the CFST member does reach its maximum resistance. A reduction coefficient K'c, related to the confinement coefficient, is introduced to account for the contribution of CFST members to the ultimate load-carrying capacity of the UHPC-CFST composite short columns. Based on the regression analysis of the relationship between the confinement index ξ and the value of fcc/fc, a unified formula for estimating the axial compressive strength of CFST short columns was proposed, combined with the experimental results in this research, and an equation for reliably predicting the strength of UHPC-CFST composite short columns under axial compression were also proposed.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.423-436
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• 2023

In this research, we tested 10 simply supported concrete-encased composite columns under monotonic eccentric loads and investigated their shear behaviour. The specimens tested were two reinforced concrete specimens, three steel-reinforced concrete (SRC) specimens with an H-shaped steel section (also called a beam section), and five SRC specimens with a cruciform-shaped steel section (also called a column section). The experimental variables included the transverse steel shape's depth and the longitudinal steel flange's width. Experimental observations indicated the following. (1) The ultimate load-carrying capacity was controlled by web compression failure, defined as a situation where the concrete within the diagonal strut's upper end was crushed. (2) The composite effect was strong before the crushing of the concrete outside the steel shape. (3) We adjusted the softened strut-and-tie SRC (SST-SRC) model to yield more accurate strength predictions than those obtained using the strength superposition method. (4) The MSST-SRC model can more reasonably predict shear strength at an initial concrete softening load point. The rationality of the MSST-SRC model was inferred by experimentally observing shear behaviour, including concrete crushing and the point of sharp variation in the shear strain.