• Computers and Concrete
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.495-504
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• 2018

The possibility of earthquakes in vulnerable regions indicates that efficient technique is required for seismic protection of buildings. During the recent decades, the concept is moving towards the insertion of base isolation on seismic prone buildings. So, investigation of structural behavior is a burning topic for buildings to be isolated in base level by bearing device. This study deals with the incorporation of base isolation system and focuses the changes of structural responses for different types of Lead Rubber Bearing (LRB) isolators. A number of sixteen model buildings have been simulated selecting twelve types of bearing systems as well as conventional fixed-base (FB) scheme. The superstructures of the high-rise buildings are represented by finite element assemblage adopting multi-degree of freedoms. Static and dynamic analyses are carried out for FB and base isolated (BI) buildings. The dynamic analysis in finite element package has been performed by the nonlinear time history analysis (THA) based on the site-specific seismic excitation and compared employing eminent earthquakes. The influence of the model type and the alteration in superstructure behavior of the isolated buildings have been duly assessed. The results of the 3D multistory structures show that the lateral forces, displacement, inertia and story accelerations of the superstructure of the seismic prone buildings are significantly reduced due to bearing insertion. The nonlinear dynamic analysis shows 12 to 40% lessening in base shear when LRB is incorporated leading to substantial allowance of horizontal displacement. It is revealed that the LRB isolators might be potential options to diminish the respective floor accelerations, inertia, displacements and base shear whatever the condition coincides. The isolators with lower force intercept but higher isolation period is found to be better for decreasing base shear, floor acceleration and inertia force leading to reduction of structural and non-structural damage. However, LRB with lower isolator period seems to be more effective in dropping displacement at bearing interface aimed at reducing horizontal shift of building structure.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.255-271
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• 2014

A method of smart system identification of super high-rise buildings is proposed in which super high-rise buildings are modeled by a shear-bending system. The method is aimed at finding the story shear and bending stiffnesses of a specific story only from the horizontal floor accelerations. The proposed method uses a set of closed-form expressions for the story shear and bending stiffnesses in terms of the limited floor accelerations and utilizes a reduced shear-bending system with the same number of elements as the observation points. A difficulty of prediction of an unstable specific function in a low frequency range can be overcome by introducing an ARX model and discussing its relation with the Taylor series expansion coefficients of a transfer function. It is demonstrated that the shear-bending system can simulate the vibration records with a reasonable accuracy. It is also shown that the vibration records at two super high-rise buildings during the 2011 Tohoku (Japan) earthquake can be simulated with the proposed method including a technique of inserting degrees of freedom between the vibration recording points. Finally it is discussed further that the time-varying identification of fundamental natural period and stiffnesses can be conducted by setting an appropriate duration of evaluation in the batch least-squares method.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.233-247
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• 2007

The insertion of steel braces has become a common technique to limit the deformability of steel framed buildings subjected to wind loads. However, when this technique is inadequate to keep floor accelerations within acceptable levels of human comfort, dampers placed in series with the steel braces can be adopted. To check the effectiveness of braces equipped with viscoelastic (VEDs) or friction dampers (FRDs), a numerical investigation is carried out focusing attention on a three-bay fifteen-storey steel framed building with K-braces. More precisely, three alternative structural solutions are examined for the purpose of controlling wind-induced vibrations: the insertion of additional diagonal braces; the insertion of additional diagonal braces equipped with dampers; the insertion of both additional diagonal braces and dampers supported by the existing K-braces. Additional braces and dampers are designed according to a simplified procedure based on a proportional stiffness criterion. A dynamic analysis is carried out in the time domain using a step-by-step initial-stress-like iterative procedure. Along-wind loads are considered at each storey assuming the time histories of the wind velocity, for a return period $T_r=5$ years, according to an equivalent wind spectrum technique. The behaviour of the structural members, except dampers, is assumed linear elastic. A VED and an FRD are idealized by a six-element generalized model and a bilinear (rigid-plastic) model, respectively. The results show that the structure with damped additional braces can be considered, among those examined, the most effective to control vibrations due to wind, particularly the floor accelerations. Moreover, once the stiffness of the additional braces is selected, the VEDs are slightly more efficient than the FRDs, because they, unlike the FRDs, dissipate energy also for small amplitude vibrations.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.179-191
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• 2018

This study is aimed at investigating the dynamic performance of a composite building structure under seismic ground motions. The building structure is an official fire department building located in southern Taiwan. It is composed of a seven-story reinforced concrete (RC) and an eight-story steel reinforced concrete (SRC) frame. Both frames share a common basement and are separated by expansion joints from the first to the seventh floor. Recorded floor accelerations of the building structure under eight earthquakes occurring during the period from 2011 to 2013 were examined in this paper. It is found that both frames had similar floor acceleration amplifications in the longitudinal direction, while the SRC frame revealed larger response than the RC frame in the transverse direction. Almost invariant and similar fundamental periods under the eight earthquakes in both directions were obtained from their transfer functions. Furthermore, numerical time-history simulations were carried out for the building structure under the most intensive earthquake. It is realized that the seismic response of the composite building was dominated by the first translational mode in each horizontal direction. Higher modes did not significantly contribute to the structural response. The conventional Rayleigh damping model could be appropriately applied to the time-history simulations under bi-directional excitations. Approximate floor acceleration envelopes were obtained with a compound RC and SRC structural model by using the average damping ratios determined from the different structural arrays.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.2696-2707
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficiency of various structural modeling schemes for evaluating seismic performances and fragility of the reactor containment building (RCB) structure in the advanced power reactor 1400 (APR1400) nuclear power plant (NPP). Four structural modeling schemes, i.e. lumped-mass stick model (LMSM), solid-based finite element model (Solid FEM), multi-layer shell model (MLSM), and beam-truss model (BTM), are developed to simulate the seismic behaviors of the containment structure. A full three-dimensional finite element model (full 3D FEM) is additionally constructed to verify the previous numerical models. A set of input ground motions with response spectra matching to the US NRC 1.60 design spectrum is generated to perform linear and nonlinear time-history analyses. Floor response spectra (FRS) and floor displacements are obtained at the different elevations of the structure since they are critical outputs for evaluating the seismic vulnerability of RCB and secondary components. The results show that the difference in seismic responses between linear and nonlinear analyses gets larger as an earthquake intensity increases. It is observed that the linear analysis underestimates floor displacements while it overestimates floor accelerations. Moreover, a systematic assessment of the capability and efficiency of each structural model is presented thoroughly. MLSM can be an alternative approach to a full 3D FEM, which is complicated in modeling and extremely time-consuming in dynamic analyses. Specifically, BTM is recommended as the optimal model for evaluating the nonlinear seismic performance of NPP structures. Thereafter, linear and nonlinear BTM are employed in a series of time-history analyses to develop fragility curves of RCB for different damage states. It is shown that the linear analysis underestimates the probability of damage of RCB at a given earthquake intensity when compared to the nonlinear analysis. The nonlinear analysis approach is highly suggested for assessing the vulnerability of NPP structures.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.548-554
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• 2003

This study alms to investigate the dynamic properties of express buses in the very low frequencies which cause motion sickness Incidence. Since passengers often use express buses for long distance traveling. it is a critical point whether the ride give rise to motion sickness or not. In the study accelerations at the three Points on the floor of the six test vehicles were measured during the driving at constant speeds. By applying the frequency weighting corves suggested in ISO 26.31-1, the Physical quantity of accelerations were changed into the perceptual amount used to judge quantitatively the incidence of motion sickness. Motion sickness dose values were calculated from the frequency weighted time history of acceleration signals, and compared between the vehicles, driving conditions. and the seat positions in the bus. During the 50 minutes' driving on the public road and high ways. the vomiting incidence ratios were seen to range from 0.4 to 0.8 ％. which is equivalent to 2.4 to 4.8 ％ for 5 hours' driving. Unlike the very smooth road conditions considered in this work, motion sickness dose values encountered in real situations are expected to increase.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.543-562
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• 2006

Base isolation technology has been accepted as a feasible and attractive way in improving seismic resistance of structures. The seismic design of new seismically isolated structures is mainly governed by the Uniform Building Code (UBC-97) published by the International Conference of Building Officials. In the UBC code, the distribution formula of the inertial (or lateral) forces leads to an inverted triangular shape in the vertical direction. It has been found to be too conservative for most isolated structures through experimental, computational and real earthquake examinations. In this paper, four simple and reasonable design formulae, based on the first mode of the base-isolated structures, for the lateral force distribution on isolated structures have been validated by a multiple-bay three-story base-isolated steel structure tested on the shaking table. Moreover, to obtain more accurate results for base-isolated structures in which higher mode contributions are more likely expected during earthquakes, another four inertial force distribution formulae are also proposed to include higher mode effects. Besides the experimental verification through shaking table tests, the vertical distributions of peak accelerations computed by the proposed design formulae are in good agreement with the recorded floor accelerations of the USC University Hospital during the Northridge earthquake.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.843-857
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• 2015

System identification is regarded as the most basic technique for structural health monitoring to evaluate structural integrity. Although many system identification techniques extracting mode information (e.g., mode frequency and mode shape) have been proposed so far, it is also desired to identify physical parameters (e.g., stiffness and damping). As for high-rise buildings subjected to long-period ground motions, system identification for evaluating only the shear stiffness based on a shear model does not seem to be an appropriate solution to the system identification problem due to the influence of overall bending response. In this paper, a system identification algorithm using a shear-bending model developed in the previous paper is revised to identify both shear and bending stiffnesses. In this algorithm, an ARX (Auto-Regressive eXogenous) model corresponding to the transfer function for interstory accelerations is applied for identifying physical parameters. For the experimental verification of the proposed system identification framework, vibration tests for a 3-story steel mini-structure are conducted. The test structure is specifically designed to measure horizontal accelerations including both shear and bending responses. In order to obtain reliable results, system identification theories for two different inputs are investigated; (a) base input motion by a modal shaker, (b) unknown forced input on the top floor.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.25 no.12
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• pp.2048-2055
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• 2001

This paper develops a computational model for estimating the ride quality of a cabover type large-sized truck in a double wheel bumpy ride test. The computational model is developed using ADAMS. To verify the developed model, an actual vehicle double wheel bumpy ride test is performed. In the test, the vehicle maintains a straight course with a constant velocity such that the front two wheels are passed the bump at the same time. The bump has the height of 60mm, and the width of 550mm. In the test, four velocities are used. They are 10kph, 20kph, 30kph and 40kph. Since the large-sized truck's center of gravity location is high, and its weight is heavy, it is a quite severe test condition to perform the test with more than 30kph velocity. In the test, vertical accelerations on the floor of the cab are measured. The measured accelerations are compared to the simulation results. From the comparison, it is shown that the developed model can predict not only the measured acceleration's tendency but also peak accelerations quite well. In this paper, the validated model is utilized to compare the ride quality between a vehicle with a multi-leaf spring and a vehicle with a tapered leaf spring in the front suspension system in a double bumpy ride test.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.551-562
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• 2021

In this study, the generalized intensity measure (IM) named I_Npg is analyzed. The recently proposed proxy of the spectral shape named N_pg is the base of this intensity measure, which is similar to the traditional N_p based on the spectral shape in terms of pseudo-acceleration; however, in this case the new generalized intensity measure can be defined through other types of spectral shapes such as those obtained with velocity, displacement, input energy, inelastic parameters and so on. It is shown that this IM is able to increase the efficiency in the prediction of nonlinear behavior of structures subjected to earthquake ground motions. For this work, the efficiency of two particular cases (based on acceleration and velocity) of the generalized I_Npg to predict the peak floor acceleration demands on steel frames under 30 earthquake ground motions with respect to the traditional spectral acceleration at first mode of vibration Sa(T₁) is compared. Additionally, a 3D reinforced concrete building and an irregular steel frame is used as a basis for comparison. It is concluded that the use of velocity and acceleration spectral shape increase the efficiency to predict peak floor accelerations in comparison with the traditional and most used around the world spectral acceleration at first mode of vibration.