• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.249-255
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• 2024

Strong ground motions at specific sites can cause severe damage to structures. Understanding the influence of site characteristics on the dynamic response of structures is crucial for evaluating their seismic performance and mitigating the potential damage caused by site effects. This study investigates the impact of the average shear wave velocity, as a site characteristic, on the seismic response of low-to-medium-rise reinforced concrete buildings. To explore them, one-dimensional soil column models were generated using shear wave velocity profile from California, and nonlinear site response analyses were performed using bedrock motions. Nonlinear dynamic structural analyses were conducted for reinforced concrete moment-resisting frame models based on the regional information. The effect of shear wave velocity on the structural response and surface ground motions was examined. The results showed that strong ground motions tend to exhibit higher damping on softer soils, reducing their intensity, while on stiffer soils, the ground motion intensity tends to amplify. Consequently, the structural response tended to increase on stiffer soils compared to softer soils.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.107-116
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• 2019

The use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is becoming an increasingly popular means to model wind flows in and around buildings. The first published application of CFD to both indoor and outdoor building airflows was in the 1970's. Since then, CFD usage has expanded to include different aspects of building design. Wind tunnel testing (WTT) on buildings for wind loads goes back as far as 1908. Gustave Eiffel built a pair of wind tunnels in 1908 and 1912. Using these he published wind loads on an aircraft hangar in 1919 as cited in Hoerner (1965 - page 74). The second of these wind tunnels is still in use today for tests including building design ($Damljanovi{\acute{c}}$, 2012). The Empire State Building was tested in 1933 in smooth flow - see Baskaran (1993). The World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City were wind tunnel tested in the mid-sixties for both wind loads, at Colorado State University (CSU) and the [US] National Physical Laboratory (NPL), as well as pedestrian level winds (PLW) at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) - Baskaran (1993). Since then, the understanding of the planetary boundary layer, recognition of the structures of turbulent wakes, instrumentation, methodologies and analysis have been continuously refined. There is a drive to replace WTT with computational methods, with the rationale that CFD is quicker, less expensive and gives more information and control to the architects. However, there is little information available to building owners and architects on the limitations of CFD for flows around buildings and communities. Hence building owners, developers, engineers and architects are not aware of the risks they incur by using CFD for different studies, traditionally conducted using wind tunnels. This paper will explain what needs to happen for CFD to replace wind tunnels. Ultimately, we anticipate the reader will come to the same conclusion that we have drawn: both WTT and CFD will continue to play important roles in building and infrastructure design. The most pressing challenge for the design and engineering community is to understand the strengths and limitations of each tool so that they can leverage and exploit the benefits that each offers while adhering to our moral and professional obligation to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.91-106
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• 2003

The paper presents the results of 1:50 geometrical scale laboratory modeling of wind-induced point pressure on the roof of the Texas Tech University (TTU) test building. The nominal (prevalent at the TTU site) wind and two bounding (low and high turbulence) flows were simulated in a boundary-layer wind tunnel at Colorado State University. The results showed significant increase in the pressure peak and standard deviation with an increase in the flow turbulence. It was concluded that the roof mid-plane pressure sensitivity to the turbulence intensity was the cause of the previously reported field-laboratory mismatch of the fluctuating pressure, for wind normal and $30^{\circ}$-off normal to the building ridge. In addition, it was concluded that the cornering wind mismatch in the roof corner/edge regions could not be solely attributed to the wind-azimuth-independent discrepancy between the turbulence intensity of the approach field and laboratory flows.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.153-167
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• 2011

The Subspace based System Identification Techniques (SSIT) have been very popular within the research circles in the last decade due to their proven superiority over the other existing system identification techniques. For operational (output only) modal analysis, the stochastic SSIT and for operational modal analysis in the presence of exogenous inputs, the combined deterministic stochastic SSIT have been used in the literature. This study compares the application of the two alternative techniques on a typical school building in Istanbul using 100 Monte Carlo simulations. The study clearly shows that the combined deterministic stochastic SSIT performs superior to the stochastic SSIT when the techniques are applied on noisy data from low to mid rise stiff structures.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.95-109
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• 2018

Since the concept was first introduced in the 1970s, transit-oriented-development (TOD) has greatly expanded in East Asian cities such as Hong Kong. Rail stations are built together with clusters of residential-commercial towers and government services to form a new style of living - a "rail village." This paper examines the composition, scale, spatial form, organization and operation of several typical rail villages in Hong Kong. The cases range across those planned from the mid-1990s to 2015. Based on the analysis of the rail village composition, the paper derives a development ratio to indicate the density, effectiveness and efficiency of a rail village catchment area. The ratio provides a useful and direct figure for the comparison of different stations, cities and development modes.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.677-690
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• 2016

In this paper, the effect of damping ratio on nonlinear dynamic analysis response and dynamic increase factor (DIF) in nonlinear static analysis of structures against column removal are investigated and a modified empirical DIF is presented. To this end, series of low and mid-rise moment frame structures with different span lengths and number of storeys are designed and the effect of damping ratio in DIF is investigated, performing several nonlinear static and dynamic analyses. For each damping ratio, a nonlinear dynamic analysis and a step by step nonlinear static analysis are carried out and the modified empirical DIF formulas are derived. The results of the analysis reveal that DIF is decreased with increasing damping ratio. Finally, an empirical formula is recommended that relates to damping ratio. Therefore, the new modified DIF can be used with nonlinear static analysis instead of nonlinear dynamic analysis to assess the progressive collapse potential of moment frame buildings with different damping ratios.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.35-57
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• 2022

This article presents a computationally efficient framework for multi-objective seismic design optimization of steel moment-resisting frame (MRF) structures based on the nonlinear dynamic analysis procedure. This framework employs the uniform damage distribution philosophy to minimize the weight (initial cost) of the structure at different levels of damage. The preliminary framework was recently proposed by the authors based on the single excitation and the nonlinear static (pushover) analysis procedure, in which the effects of record-to-record variability as well as higher-order vibration modes were neglected. The present study investigates the reliability of the previous framework by extending the proposed algorithm using the nonlinear dynamic design procedure (optimization under multiple ground motions). Three benchmark structures, including 4-, 8-, and 12-story steel MRFs, representing the behavior of low-, mid-, and high-rise buildings, are utilized to evaluate the proposed framework. The total weight of the structure and the maximum inter-story drift ratio (IDRmax) resulting from the average response of the structure to a set of seven ground motion records are considered as two conflicting objectives for the optimization problem and are simultaneously minimized. The results of this study indicate that the optimization under several ground motions leads to almost similar outcomes in terms of optimization objectives to those are obtained from optimization under pushover analysis. However, investigation of optimal designs under a suite of 22 earthquake records reveals that the damage distribution in buildings designed by the nonlinear dynamic-based procedure is closer to the uniform distribution (desired target during the optimization process) compared to those designed according to the pushover procedure.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.211-222
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• 2016

Reinforced concrete shear walls with deficient reinforcement details are tested under cyclic loading. The deficiency of reinforcement details includes insufficient splice length in U-stirrups at the ends of horizontal reinforcement and boundary column dowel bars found in existing low- to mid-rise Korean buildings designed non-seismically. Three test specimens have rectangular, babel and flanged sections, respectively. Flexure- and shear-controlled models for reinforced concrete shear walls specified in ASCE/SEI 41-13 are compared with the flexural and shear components of force-displacement relation extracted separately from the top displacement of the specimen based on the displacement data measured at diverse locations. Modification of the shear wall models in ASCE/SEI 41-13 is proposed in order to account for the effect of bar slip, cracking loads in flexure and shear. The proposed modification shows better approximation of the test results compared to the original models.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.133-140
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• 2014

The friction damper can be used for improving the seismic resistance of existing buildings. The damper is often installed in bracing members. The energy dissipation capacity of the damping systems depends on the type of the structure, the configuration of the bracing members, and the property of dampers. In Korea, there are numerous low- to mid-rise reinforced concrete moment frames that were constructed considering only gravity loads. Those frames may be vulnerable for future earthquakes. To resolve the problem, this study developed a toggle bracing system with a high density friction damper. To investigate the improvement of reinforced concrete frames after retrofit using the developed damped system, experimental tests were conducted on frame specimens with and without the damped system. The results showed that the maximum strength, initial stiffness and energy dissipation capacity of the framed with the damped system were much larger than those of the frame without the damped system.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.461-481
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• 2016

The research described in this paper investigates the seismic behaviour of lightly reinforced concrete (RC) bearing sandwich panels, heavily conditioned by shear deformation. A numerical model has been prepared, within an open source finite element (FE) platform, to simulate the experimental response of this emerging structural system, whose squat-type geometry affects performance and failure mode. Calibration of this equivalent mechanical model, consisting of a group of regularly spaced vertical elements in combination with a layer of nonlinear springs, which represent the cyclic behaviour of concrete and steel, has been conducted by means of a series of pseudo-static cyclic tests performed on single full-scale prototypes with or without openings. Both cantilevered and fixed-end shear walls have been analyzed. After validation, this numerical procedure, including cyclic-related mechanisms, such as buckling and subsequent slippage of reinforcing re-bars, as well as concrete crushing at the base of the wall, has been used to assess the capacity of two- and three-dimensional low- to mid-rise box-type buildings and, hence, to estimate their strength reduction factors, on the basis of conventional pushover analyses.