• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.1391-1404
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• 2016

Peninsular Malaysia lying on the stable Sunda Plate has traditionally been considered safe with low to moderate seismicity. However, far field Sumatran mega-earthquakes have been shown to be capable of triggering ground motions felt in high rise structures in the major Malaysian cities while seismic impact from local earthquakes of moment magnitude 3.8 have reportedly induced nominal structural damages to nearby buildings. This paper presents an overview of the recent seismic activities in and around Peninsular Malaysia with reference to prominent earthquakes generated by far field interplate and local intraplate sources. Records of ground motion data and seismic hazard assessment (SHA) results available in the literature have been analyzed and discussed. The peak ground acceleration (PGA) values from historical records for few local intraplate events were observed to be higher than those for the events from Sumatran Subduction Zone. This clearly points to the need for a detailed and comprehensive SHA incorporating both far field and local sources. Such an analysis would contribute the knowledge required for secure and reliable infrastructure design and safeguard the Malaysian people and economy.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.191-204
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• 2019

Near-field earthquake records including long-period high-amplitude velocity pulses can cause large isolation system displacements leading to buckling or rupture of isolators. In such cases, providing supplemental damping in the isolation system has been proposed as a solution. However, it is known that linear viscous dampers can reduce base displacements in case of near-field earthquakes but at the potential expense of increased superstructure response in case of far-field earthquakes. But can non-linear dampers with different levels of non-linearity offer a superior seismic performance? In order to answer this question, the effectiveness of non-linear viscous dampers in reducing isolator displacements and its effects on the superstructure response are investigated. A comparison with linear viscous dampers via time history analysis is done using a base-isolated benchmark building model under historical near-field and far-field earthquake records for a wide range of different levels of non-linearity and supplemental damping. The results show that the non-linearity level and the amount of supplemental damping play important roles in reducing base displacements effectively. Although use of non-linear supplemental dampers may cause superstructure response amplification in case of far-field earthquakes, this negative effect may be avoided or even reduced by using appropriate combinations of non-linearity level and supplemental damping.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.443-456
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• 2021

Structural design of the vertical displacements and shear strains in the earth fill (EF) dams has great importance in the structural engineering problems. Moreover, far fault earthquakes have significant seismic effects on seismic damage performance of EF dams like the near fault earthquakes. For this reason, three dimensional (3D) earthquake damage performance of Oroville dam is assessed considering different far-fault ground motions in this study. Oroville Dam was built in United States of America-California and its height is 234.7 m (770 ft.). 3D model of Oroville dam is modelled using FLAC3D software based on finite difference approach. In order to represent interaction condition between discrete surfaces, special interface elements are used between dam body and foundation. Non-reflecting seismic boundary conditions (free field and quiet) are defined to the main surfaces of the dam for the nonlinear seismic analyses. 6 different far-fault ground motions are taken into account for the full reservoir condition of Oroville dam. According to nonlinear seismic analysis results, the effects of far-fault ground motions on the nonlinear seismic settlement and shear strain behaviour of Oroville EF dam are determined and evaluated in detail. It is clearly seen that far-fault earthquakes have very significant seismic effects on the settlement-shear strain behaviour of EF dams and these earthquakes create vital important seismic damages on the swelling behaviour of dam body surface. Moreover, it is proposed that far-fault ground motions should not be ignored while modelling EF dams.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.76 no.6
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• pp.751-763
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• 2020

Available records of recent earthquakes show that near-field earthquakes have different characteristics than far-field earthquakes. In general, most of these unique characteristics of near-fault records can be attributed to their forward directivity. This phenomenon causes the records of ground motion normal to the fault to entail pulses with long periods in the velocity time history. The energy of the earthquake is almost accumulated in these pulses causing large displacements and, accordingly, severe damages in the building. Damage to structures caused by past earthquakes raises the need to assess the chance of future earthquake damage. There are a variety of methods to evaluate building seismic vulnerabilities with different computational cost and accuracy. In the meantime, fragility curves, which defines the possibility of structural damage as a function of ground motion characteristics and design parameters, are more common. These curves express the percentage of probability that the structural response will exceed the allowable performance limit at different seismic intensities. This study aims to obtain the fragility curve for low- and mid-rise structures of reinforced concrete moment frames by incremental dynamic analysis (IDA). These frames were exposed to an ensemble of 18 ground motions (nine records near-faults and nine records far-faults). Finally, after the analysis, their fragility curves are obtained using the limit states provided by HAZUS-MH 2.1. The result shows the near-fault earthquakes can drastically influence the fragility curves of the 6-story building while it has a minimal impact on those of the 3-story building.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.401-419
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• 2022

A novel hybrid extreme machine learning-multiverse optimizer (ELM-MVO) framework is proposed to predict the liquefaction phenomenon in seismically excited tunnel lining inside the sand lens. The MVO is applied to optimize the input weights and biases of the ELM algorithm to improve its efficiency. The tunnel located inside the liquefied sand lens is also evaluated under various near- and far-field earthquakes. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to predict the liquefaction event against the conventional extreme machine learning (ELM) and artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms. The outcomes also indicate that the possibility of liquefaction in sand lenses under far-field seismic excitations is much less than the near-field excitations, even with a small magnitude. Hence, tunnels designed in geographical areas where seismic excitations are more likely to be generated in the near area should be specially prepared. The sand lens around the tunnel also has larger settlements due to liquefaction.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.533-543
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• 2019

This paper presents a study on the behavior of an RC bridge under near-field and far-field ground motions. For this purpose, a dynamic nonlinear finite element time history analysis has been conducted. The near-field and far-field records are chosen pairwise from the same events which are fits to the seismic design of the bridge. In order to perform an accurate seismic evaluation, the model has been analyzed under two vertical and horizontal components of ground motions. Parameters of relative displacement, residual displacement, and maximum plastic strain have been considered and compared in terms of near-field and far-field ground motions. In the following, in order to decrease the undesirable effects of near-field ground motions, a viscous damper is suggested and its effects have been studied. In this case, the results show that the near-field ground motions increase maximum relative and residual displacement respectively up to three and twice times. Significant seismic improvements were achieved by using viscous dampers on the bridge model. Somehow under the considered near-field ground motion, parameters of residual and relative displacement decrease dramatically even less than the model without damper under the far-field record of the same ground motion.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.625-641
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• 2020

The realistic modeling of the beam-column semi-rigid connection in steel frames attracted the attention of many researchers in the past for the seismic analysis of semi-rigid frames. Comparatively less studies have been made to investigate the behavior of steel frames with semi-rigid connections under different types of earthquake. Herein, the seismic behavior of semi-rigid steel frames is investigated under both far and near-field earthquakes. The semi-rigid connection is modeled by the multilinear plastic link element consisting of rotational springs. The kinematic hysteresis model is used to define the dynamic behavior of the rotational spring, describing the nonlinearity of the semi-rigid connection as defined in SAP2000. The nonlinear time history analysis (NTHA) is performed to obtain response time histories of the frame under scaled earthquakes at three PGA levels denoting the low, medium and high-level earthquakes. The other important parameters varied are the stiffness and strength parameters of the connections, defining the degree of semi-rigidity. For studying the behavior of the semi-rigid frame, a large number of seismic demand parameters are considered. The benchmark for comparison is taken as those of the corresponding rigid frame. Two different frames, namely, a five-story frame and a ten-story frame are considered as the numerical examples. It is shown that semi-rigid frames prove to be effective and beneficial in resisting the seismic forces for near-field earthquakes (PGA ≈ 0.2g), especially in reducing the base shear to a considerable extent for the moderate level of earthquake. Further, the semi-rigid frame with a relatively weaker beam and less connection stiffness may withstand a moderately strong earthquake without having much damage in the beams.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.713-730
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• 2021

The seismic performance of rigid steel frames is widely investigated, but that of semi-rigid (SR) steel frames are not studied extensively, especially for near-field earthquakes. In this paper, the performances of five and ten-story steel SR frames having different degrees of semi-rigidity are evaluated at four performance points in the four different deformation states, namely, the elastic, elasto-plastic, plastic, and near collapse states. The performances of the SR frames are measured by the response parameters including the maximum values of the top floor displacement, base shear, inter-story drift ratio, number of plastic hinges, and SRSS of plastic hinge rotations. These response parameters are obtained by the capacity spectrum method (CSM) using pushover analysis. The validity of the response parameters determined by the CSM is evaluated by the results of the nonlinear time history analysis (NLTHA) for both near and far-field earthquakes at different PGA levels, which are consistent with the performance points. Results of the study show that the plastic hinges of SR frame significantly increase in the range of plastic to near-collapse states for both near and far-field earthquakes. The effect of the degree of semi-rigidity is pronounced only at higher degrees of semi-rigidity. The predictions of the CSM are fairly well in comparison to the NLTHA.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.367-392
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• 2020

The specific characteristics of near-field earthquake records can lead to different dynamic responses of bridges compared to far-field records. However, the effect of near-field strong ground motion has often been neglected in the seismic performance assessment of the bridges. Furthermore, damage to horizontally curved multi-frame RC box-girder bridges in the past earthquakes has intensified the potential of seismic vulnerability of these structures due to their distinctive dynamic behavior. Based on the nonlinear time history analyses in OpenSEES, this article, assesses the effects of near-field versus far-field earthquakes on the seismic performance of horizontally curved multi-frame RC box-girder bridges by accounting the vertical component of the earthquake records. Analytical seismic fragility curves have been derived thru considering uncertainties in the earthquake records, material and geometric properties of bridges. The findings indicate that near-field effects reasonably increase the seismic vulnerability in this bridge sub-class. The results pave the way for future regional risk assessments regarding the importance of either including or excluding near-field effects on the seismic performance of horizontally curved bridges.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.391-405
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• 2020

The use of passive energy dissipation devices has been widely used in the construction industry to minimize the probability of damage occurred under intense ground motion. In this study, collapse margin ratio (CMR) and fragility curves are the main parameters in the assessment to characterize the collapse safety of the structures. The assessment is done on three types of RC frame structures, incorporating three types of dampers, viscoelastic, friction, and BRB dampers. The Incremental dynamic analyses (IDA) were performed by simulating an array of 20 strong ground motion (SGM) records considering both far-field and near-field seismic scenarios that were followed by fragility curves. With respect to far-field ground motion records, the CMR values of the selected frames indicate to be higher and reachable to safety margin more than those under near-field ground motion records that introduce a high devastating impact on the structures compared to far-field excitations. This implies that the near field impact affects the ground movements at the site by attenuation the direction and causing high-frequency filtration. Besides that, the results show that the viscoelastic damper gives better performance for the structures in terms of reducing the damages compared to the other energy dissipation devices during earthquakes.