• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.117-134
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• 2007

The force (load) reduction factor, R, which is one of the most important parameters in earthquake load calculation, is independent of the dimensions of the structure but is defined on the basis of the load bearing system of the structure as defined in earthquake codes. Significant damages and failures were experienced on prefabricated reinforced concrete structures during the last three major earthquakes in Turkey (Adana 1998, Kocaeli 1999, Duzce 1999) and the experts are still discussing the main reasons of those failures. Most of them agreed that they resulted mainly from the earthquake force reduction factor, R that is incorrectly selected during design processes, in addition to all other detailing errors. Thus this wide spread damages caused by the earthquake to prefabricated structures aroused suspicion about the correctness of the R coefficient recommended in the current Turkish Earthquake Codes (TEC - 98). In this study, an attempt was made for an approximate determination of R coefficient for widely utilized prefabricated structure types (single-floor single-span) with variable dimensions. According to the selecting variable dimensions, 140 sample frames were computed using pushover analysis. The force reduction factor R was calculated by load-displacement curves obtained pushover analysis for each frame. Then, formulated artificial neural network method was trained by using 107 of the 140 sample frames. For the training various algorithms were used. The method was applied and used for the prediction of the R rest 33 frames with about 92% accuracy. The paper also aims at proposing the authorities to change the R coefficient values predicted in TEC - 98 for prefabricated concrete structures.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.9
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• pp.4216-4222
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• 2011

In this study the inelastic behavior of the existing school buildings with infilled masonry walls is analysed by pushover method. The shear stiffness and strength of masonry wall is calculated from the prior experimets and verified by inelastic analysis. The height of infilled masonry wall affects the structural behavior. The higher the masonry wall height, the higher the initial shear stiffness and strength of masonry wall. As the cracks are developed, the strength of masonry wall is much decreased. The proposed inelastic analysis method shows similar results with the experiments and can be used as inelastic analysis model of reinforced concrete buildings with infilled masonry walls.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.76 no.3
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• pp.279-291
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• 2020

The seismic design of conventional frame structures is meant to enhance plastic deformations at beam ends and prevent yielding in columns. To this end, columns are made stronger than beams. Yet yielding in columns cannot be avoided with the column-to-beam strength ratios (about 1.3) prescribed by seismic codes. Preventing plastic deformations in columns calls for ratios close to 4, which is not feasible for economic reasons. Furthermore, material properties and the rearrangement of geometric shapes inevitably make the distribution of damage among stories uneven. Damage in the i-th story can be characterized as the accumulated plastic strain energy (W_pi) normalized by the product of the story shear force (Q_yi) and drift (δ_yi) at yielding. Past studies showed that the distribution of the plastic strain energy dissipation demand, W_pi/ΣW_pj, can be evaluated from the deviation of Q_yi with respect to an "optimum value" that would make the ratio W_pi/(Q_yiδ_yi) -i.e. the damage- equal in all stories. This paper investigates how the soil type and ductility demand affect the optimum lateral strength distribution. New optimum lateral strength distributions are put forth and compared with others proposed in the literature.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.68 no.5
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• pp.575-589
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• 2018

It is well known that the incidence angle of seismic excitation has an influence on the structural response of buildings, and this effect can be more significant in the case of near-fault signals. However, current seismic codes do not include detailed requirements regarding the direction of application of the seismic action and they have only recently introduced specific provisions about near-fault earthquakes. Thus, engineers have the task of evaluating all the relevant directions or the most critical conditions case by case, in order to avoid underestimating structural demand. To facilitate the identification of the most critical incidence angle, this paper presents a procedure which makes use of a two-degree of freedom model for representing a building. The proposed procedure makes it possible to avoid the extensive computational effort of multiple dynamic analyses with varying angles of incidence of ground motion excitation, which is required if a spatial multi-degree of freedom model is used for representing a building. The procedure is validated through the analysis of two case studies consisting of an eight- and a six-storey reinforced concrete frame building, selected as representative of existing structures located in Italy. A set of 124 near-fault ground motion records oriented along 8 incidence angles, varying from 0 to 180 degrees, with increments of 22.5 degrees, is used to excite the structures. Comparisons between the results obtained with detailed models of the two structures and the proposed procedure are used to show the accuracy of the latter in the prediction of the most critical angle of seismic incidence.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.147-165
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• 2023

The paper contrasts conventional seismic design with a design that incorporates buckling-restrained bracing in three-dimensional reinforced concrete buildings (BRBs). The suboptimal structures may be found using the multi-objective chimp optimization algorithm (MEN-ChOA). Given the constraints and dimensions, ChOA suffers from a slow convergence rate and tends to become stuck in local minima. Therefore, the ChOA is improved by niching and evolutionary operators to overcome the aforementioned problems. In addition, a new technique is presented to compute seismic and dead loads that include all of a structure's parts in an algorithm for three-dimensional frame design rather than only using structural elements. The performance of the constructed multi-objective model is evaluated using 12 standard multi-objective benchmarks proposed in IEEE congress on evolutionary computation. Second, MEN-ChOA is employed in constructing several reinforced concrete structures by the Mexico City building code. The variety of Pareto optimum fronts of these criteria enables a thorough performance examination of the MEN-ChOA. The results also reveal that BRB frames with comparable structural performance to conventional moment-resistant reinforced concrete framed buildings are more cost-effective when reinforced concrete building height rises. Structural performance and building cost may improve by using a nature-inspired strategy based on MEN-ChOA in structural design work.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.86 no.4
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• pp.547-571
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• 2023

To deeply probe the actual earthquake level and fragility of typical reinforced concrete (RC) structures under multiple intensity grades, considering diachronic measurement building stock samples and actual observations of representative catastrophic earth shocks in China from 1990 to 2010, RC structures were divided into traditional RC structures (TRCs) and bottom reinforced concrete frame seismic wall masonry (BFM) structures, and the empirical damage characteristics and mechanisms were analysed. A great deal of statistics and induction were developed on the historical experience investigation data of 59 typical catastrophic earthquakes in 9 provinces of China. The database and fragility matrix prediction model were established with TRCs of 4,122.5284×104 m² and 5,844 buildings and BFMs of 5,872 buildings as empirical seismic damage samples. By employing the methods of structural damage probability and statistics, nonlinear prediction of seismic vulnerability, and numerical and applied functional analysis, the comparison matrix of actual fragility probability prediction of TRC and BFM in multiple intensity regions under the latest version of China's macrointensity standard was established. A novel nonlinear regression prediction model of seismic vulnerability was proposed, and prediction models considering the seismic damage ratio and transcendental probability parameters were constructed. The time-varying vulnerability comparative model of the sample database was developed according to the different periods of multiple earthquakes. The new calculation method of the average fragility prediction index (AFPI) matrix parameter model has been proposed to predict the seismic fragility of an areal RC structure.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.629-636
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• 2011

It has been suggested that buildings designed for strong ground motions will also have improved resistance to air blast loads. As an initial attempt to quantify this behavior, the responses of a ten story steel building, designed for the 1994 building code, with lateral resistance provided by perimeter moment frames, is considered. An analytical model of the building is developed and the magnitude and distribution of blast loads on the structure are estimated using available computer software that is based on empirical methods. To obtain the relationship between pressure, time duration, and standoff distance, these programs are used to obtain an accurate model of the air blast loading. A hemispherical surface burst for various explosive weights and standoff distances is considered for generating the air blast loading and determining the structural response. Linear and nonlinear analyses are conducted for these loadings. Air blast demands on the structure are compared to current seismic guidelines. These studies present the displacement responses, story drifts, demand/capacity ratio and inelastic demands for this structure.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.53-61
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• 2014

RC shear wall sections which have irregular shapes such as T, ㄱ, ㄷ sections are typically used in low-rise buildings in Korea. Pushover analysis of building containing such members costs a lot of computation time and needs professional knowledge since it requires complicated modeling and, sometimes, fails to converge. In this study, a method using an equivalent column element for the shear wall is proposed. The equivalent column element consists of an elastic column, an inelastic rotational spring, and rigid beams. The inelastic properties of the rotational spring represent the nonlinear behavior of the shearwall and are obtained from the section analysis results and moment distribution for the member. The use of an axial force to compensate the difference in the axial deformation between the equivalent column element and the actual shear wall is also proposed. The proposed method is applied for the pushover analysis of a 5- story shear wall-frame building and the results are compared with ones using the fiber elements. The comparison shows that the inelastic behavior at the same drift was comparable. However, the performance points estimated using the pushover curves showed some deviations, which seem to be caused by the differences of estimated yield point and damping ratios.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.227-237
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• 2017

This paper presents optimization of a long-span portal steel frame under dynamic wind loads using a surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithm. Long-span portal steel frames are often used in low-rise industrial and commercial buildings. The structure needs be able to resist the wind loads, and at the same time it should be as light as possible in order to be cost-effective. In this work, numerical model of a portal steel frame is constructed using structural analysis program (SAP2000), with the web-heights at five locations of I-sections of the columns and rafters as the decision variables. In order to evaluate the performance of a given design under dynamic wind loading, the equivalent static wind load (ESWL) is obtained from a database of wind pressures measured in wind tunnel tests. A modified formulation of the problem compared to the one available in the literature is also presented, considering additional design constraints for practicality. Evolutionary algorithms (EA) are often used to solve such non-linear, black-box problems, but when each design evaluation is computationally expensive (e.g., in this case a SAP2000 simulation), the time taken for optimization using EAs becomes untenable. To overcome this challenge, we employ a surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithm (SAEA) to expedite the convergence towards the optimum design. The presented SAEA uses multiple spatially distributed surrogate models to approximate the simulations more accurately in lieu of commonly used single global surrogate models. Through rigorous numerical experiments, improvements in results and time savings obtained using SAEA over EA are demonstrated.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.108-116
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• 2017

In this study, the prototype structure of seismically designed steel moment frame was analyzed statically and dynamically in order to demonstrate the applicability of energy-based approximate analysis with the dynamic effect of sudden column loss in the evaluation of the collapse resistance and a method for assessing the sensitivity to progressive collapse was proposed. For the purpose of comparing the structural behavior of buildings with different structural systems, the sensitivity of the structure to the sudden removal of vertical members can be used as a significant measure. The energy-based approximate analysis prediction for the prototype structure considered in the study showed good agreement with the dynamic analysis result. In the sensitivity evaluation, the structural robustness index that indicates the ability of a structure to resist collapse induced by abnormal loads was used. It was confirmed that the proposed methods can be used conveniently and rationally in progressive collapse analysis and design.