• Computers and Concrete
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• 제22권1호
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• pp.123-132
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• 2018

Reinforced concrete (RC) columns which are the main vertical structural members are exposed to several static and dynamic effects such as earthquake and wind. However, impact loading that is sudden impulsive dynamic one is the most effective loading type acting on the RC columns. Impact load is a kind of impulsive dynamic load which is ignored in the design process of RC columns like other structural members. The behavior of reinforced concrete columns under impact loading is an area of research that is still not well understood; however, work in this area continues to be motivated by a broad range of applications. Examples include reinforced concrete structures designed to resist accidental loading scenarios such as falling rock impact; vehicle or ship collisions with buildings, bridges, or offshore facilities; and structures that are used in high-threat or high-hazard applications, such as military fortification structures or nuclear facilities. In this study, free weight falling test setup is developed to investigate the behavior effects on RC columns under impact loading. For this purpose, eight RC column test specimens with 1/3 scale are manufactured. While drop height and mass of the striker are constant, application point of impact loading, stirrup spacing and concrete compression strength are the experimental variables. The time-history of the impact force, the accelerations of two points and the displacement of columns were measured. The crack patterns of RC columns are also observed. In the light of experimental results, low-velocity impact behavior of RC columns were determined and interpreted. Besides, the finite element models of RC columns are generated using ABAQUS software. It is found out that proposed finite element model could be used for evaluation of dynamic responses of RC columns subjected to low-velocity impact load.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.259-269
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• 2005

This paper describes the application of genetic algorithm for the discrete optimum design of reinforced concrete continuous beams. The objective is to minimize the total cost of reinforced concrete beams including the costs of concrete, form work, main reinforcement and stirrup. The flexural and shear strength, deflection, crack, spacing of reinforcement, concrete cover, upper-lower bounds on main reinforcement, beam width-depth ratio and anchorage for main reinforcement are considered as the constraints. The width and effective depth of beam and steel area are taken as design variables, and those are selected among the discrete design space which is composed with dimensions and steel area being used from in practice. Optimum result obtained from GA is compared with other literature to verify the validity of GA. To show the applicability and efficiency of GA, it is applied to three and five span reinforced concrete beams satisfying with the Korean standard specifications.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• 제23권2호
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• pp.29-36
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• 2023

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely applied to various engineering fields. Especially, RL has shown successful performance for control problems, such as vehicles, robotics, and active structural control system. However, little research on application of RL to optimal structural design has conducted to date. In this study, the possibility of application of RL to structural design of reinforced concrete (RC) beam was investigated. The example of RC beam structural design problem introduced in previous study was used for comparative study. Deep q-network (DQN) is a famous RL algorithm presenting good performance in the discrete action space and thus it was used in this study. The action of DQN agent is required to represent design variables of RC beam. However, the number of design variables of RC beam is too many to represent by the action of conventional DQN. To solve this problem, multi-agent DQN was used in this study. For more effective reinforcement learning process, DDQN (Double Q-Learning) that is an advanced version of a conventional DQN was employed. The multi-agent of DDQN was trained for optimal structural design of RC beam to satisfy American Concrete Institute (318) without any hand-labeled dataset. Five agents of DDQN provides actions for beam with, beam depth, main rebar size, number of main rebar, and shear stirrup size, respectively. Five agents of DDQN were trained for 10,000 episodes and the performance of the multi-agent of DDQN was evaluated with 100 test design cases. This study shows that the multi-agent DDQN algorithm can provide successfully structural design results of RC beam.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• 제18권2호
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• pp.21-29
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• 2014

This paper evaluates the shear strength, behavior and failure mode of reinforced concrete beams with deformed GFRP reinforcing bar. Four concrete beam specimens were constructed and tested. It was carried out to observe failure behavior and load-deflection of simply supported concrete beams subjected to four-point monotonic loading. In order to eliminate of the uncertainty by the shear reinforcements, any stirrups were not used. Variables of the specimens were shear span-depth ratio, effective reinforcement ratio. The dimensions of specimen is 3,300 or $1,950mm{\times}200mm{\times}240mm$. Clear span and shear span were 2,900mm, 1,000mm respectively. Shear span-depth ratios were 6.5 and 2.5. Effective ratios of Longitudinal GFRP reinforcing bar were $1.126{\rho}_{fb}$, $2.250{\rho}_{fb}$, $3.375{\rho}_{fb}$ and $0.634{\rho}_{fb}$. All beam specimens were broken by diagonal-tension shear and the ACI 440.1R, CSA S806 and ISIS, which was used to design test beams, showed considerable deviation between prediction and test results of shear strengths.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• 제23권2호
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• pp.95-101
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• 2022

This study attempts to identify the ways of reducing the floor impact sound, by applying six different types of the reinforced bar girders and stirrup arrangements to the Structure: (1) the longer-direction girder arrangements (2) the shorter-direction girder arrangements (3) the diagonal-direction arrangements (4) the longer-direction girder arrangements with stirrups (5) the shorter-direction girder arrangements with stirrups (6) the diagonal-direction arrangements with stirrups. In order to identify the most effective structural changes, each slab was tested with bang machines, measuring the level of the sound impact. The results showed that the longer-direction girder arrangements with stirrups were the most effective one. In addition, the effectiveness of slab was found to be remarkable, showing the level of minimum 1dB to maximum 5dB, where the slab was compared with the control models without girders and stirrups. In conclusion, it is suggested that the longer-direction girder arrangements with stirrups could possibly be applied to the Wall Structures to minimize the floor impact sound.