• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.161-170
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• 2023

Ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) is produced using high amount of cementitious materials, very low water/cementitious materials ratio, fine-sized fillers, and steel fibers. Due to the dense microstructure of UHPC, it possesses very high strength, elasticity, and durability. Besides that, the UHPC exhibits high ductility and fracture toughness due to presence of fibers in its matrix. While the high ductility of UHPC allows it to undergo high strain/deflection before failure, the high fracture toughness of UHPC greatly enhances its capacity to absorb impact energy without allowing the formation of severe cracking or penetration by the impactor. These advantages with UHPC make it a suitable material for construction of the structural members subjected to special loading conditions. In this research work, the UHPC mixtures having three different dosages of steel fibers (2%, 4% and 6% by weight corresponding to 0.67%, 1.33% and 2% by volume) were characterized in terms of their mechanical properties including facture toughness, before using these concrete mixtures for casting the slab specimens, which were tested under high-energy impact loading with the help of a drop-weight impact test setup. The effect of fiber content on the impact energy absorption capacity and central deflection of the slab specimens were investigated and the equations correlating fiber content with the energy absorption capacity and central deflection were obtained with high degrees of fit. Finite element modeling (FEM) was performed to simulate the behavior of the slabs under impact loading. The FEM results were found to be in good agreement with their corresponding experimentally generated results.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.567-582
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• 2022

In the present study, a series of physical experiments and numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the effects of mode I and mixed-mode I/II cracks on the fracture modes and stability of roadway tunnel models. The experiments and simulations incorporated different inclination angle flaws under both static and dynamic loads. The quasi-static and dynamic testing were conducted by using an electro-hydraulic servo control device and drop weight impact system (DWIS), and the failure process was simulated by using rock failure process analysis (RFPA) and AUTODYN software. The stress intensity factor was also calculated to evaluate the stability of the flawed roadway tunnel models by using ABAQUS software. According to comparisons between the test and numerical results, it is observed that for flawed roadways with a single radical crack and inclination angle of 45°, the static and dynamic stability are the lowest relative to other angles of fractured rock masses. For mixed-mode I/II cracks in flawed roadway tunnel models under dynamic loading, a wing crack is produced and the pre-existing cracks increase the stress concentration factor in the right part of the specimen, but this factor will not be larger than the maximum principal stress region in the roadway tunnel models. Additionally, damage to the sidewalls will be involved in the flawed roadway tunnel models under static loads.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.661-675
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• 2022

In this paper, an electric vehicle drives with efficient control and low cost hardware using four quadrant DC converter with Permanent Magnet Direct Current (PMDC) motor fed by DC boost converter is presented. The main idea of this work is to improve the energy efficiency of the conversion chain of an electric vehicle by inserting a boost converter between the battery and the four quadrant-DC motor chopper assembly. Consequently, this method makes it possible to maintain the amplification gain of the 4 quadrant chopper constant regardless of the battery voltage drop and even in the presence of a fault in the battery. One of the most important control problems is control under heavy uncertainty conditions. The higher order sliding mode control technique is introduced for the adjustment of DC bus voltage and mechanical motor speed. To implement the proposed approach in the automotive field, experimental tests were carried out. The performances obtained show the usefulness of this system for a better energy management of an electric vehicle and an ideal control under different operating conditions and constraints, mostly at nominal operation, in the presence of a load torque, when reversing the direction of rotation of the motor speed and even in case of battery chamber failure. The whole system has been tested experimentally and its performance has been analyzed.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.199-213
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• 2022

Experimental and discrete element approaches were used to examine the effects of F shape non-persistent joints on the failure behaviour of concrete under uniaxial compressive test. concrete specimens with dimensions of 200 cm×200 cm×50 cm were provided. Within the specimen, F shape non-persistent joint consisting three joints were provided. The large joint length was 6 cm, and the length of two small joints were 2 cm. Vertical distance between two small joints change from 1.5 cm to 4.5 cm with increment of 1.5 cm. In constant joint lengths, the angle of large joint change from 0° to 90° with increments of 30°. Totally 12 different models were tested under compression test. The axial load rate on the model was 0.05 mm/min. Concurrent with experimental tests, numerical simulation (Particle flow code in two dimension) were performed on the models containing F shape non-persistent joint. Distance between small joints and joint angles were similar to experimental one. the results indicated that the failure process was mostly governed by both of the Distance between small joints and joint angles. The axial loading rate on the model was 0.05 mm/min. The compressive strengths of the samples were related to the fracture pattern and failure mechanism of the discontinuities. Furthermore, it was shown that the compressive behaviour of discontinuities is related to the number of the induced tensile cracks which are increased by increasing the joint angle. In the first, there were only a few acoustic emission (AE) hits in the initial stage of loading, and then AE hits rapidly grow before the applied stress reached its peak. Furthermore, a large number of AE hits accompanied every stress drop. Finally, the failure pattern and failure strength are similar in both approaches i.e., the experimental testing and the numerical simulation approaches.

• Advances in nano research
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.59-65
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• 2023

In this present article, the mechanical behavior of single-walled black phosphorene nanotubes (SW-αPNTs) is simulated using molecular dynamics (MD). The proposed model is subjected to the axial loading and the effects of morphological parameters, such as the mono-vacancy defect and strain rate on the tensile behavior of the zigzag and armchair SW-αPNTs are studied as a pioneering work. In order to assess the accuracy of the MD simulations, the stress-strain response of the current MD model is successfully verified with the efficient quantum mechanical approach of the density functional theory (DFT). Along with reproducing the DFT results, the accurate MD simulations successfully anticipate a significant variation in the stress-strain curve of the zigzag SW-αPNTs, namely the knick point. Predicting such mechanical behavior of SW-αPNTs may be an important design factor for lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors, and energy storage devices. The simulations show that the ultimate stress is increased by increasing the diameter of the pristine SW-αPNTs. The trend is identical for the ultimate strain and stress-strain slope as the diameter of the pristine zigzag SW-αPNTs enlarges. The obtained results denote that by increasing the strain rate, the ultimate stress/ultimate strain are respectively increased/declined. The stress-strain slope keeps increasing as the strain rate grows. It is worth noting that the existence of mono-atomic vacancy defects in the (12,0) zigzag and (0,10) armchair SW-αPNT structures leads to a drop in the tensile strength by amounts of 11.1% and 12.5%, respectively. Also, the ultimate strain is considerably altered by mono-atomic vacancy defects.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.87 no.4
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• pp.317-332
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• 2023

Understanding and analysing the behaviour and response of historical structures in the face of climate changes and environmental conditions is of utmost significance for their preservation. There are several structural hazards associated with climate and hydrology changes in the region, including the settlement of piers, the rotation of piers, and temperature changes. The present study investigates the experimental and numerical structural behaviour of skewed and non-skewed Persian brick masonry barrel vaults under various conditions. The external loading conditions included pier rotation in five modes, settlement, and temperature variations in four states. Initially, the experiments extracted the mechanical properties of the scaled materials. Then, three semi-circular brick barrel vaults were tested with gravitational loads. The outcomes were used to develop and validate the finite element model. Following the development of the finite element model, numerical and parametric studies were conducted on the effect of the aforementioned structural hazards on the response of brick masonry barrel vaults with various Persian geometries (semi-circular, drop pointed, and four-centred), angles of skew (0, 15, 30, and 45 degrees), and dimensional ratios. According to the findings, the fragility of masonry materials makes historical structures susceptible to failure under different loading. A brick barrel vault fails in the presence of minor rotation and settlement of the piers. The four-centred geometric shape has the lowest performance among the seven Persian geometries; therefore, its health monitoring and retrofitting should be prioritised. In Isfahan, Iran, temperature variations, particularly during the warm seasons, cause critical conditions in such structures.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.23-39
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• 2023

One of the important problems of concrete placing is the concrete compaction, which can affect the strength, durability and apparent quality of the hardened concrete. Therefore, vibrating operations might be accompanied by much noise and the need for training the involved workers, while inappropriate functioning can result in many problems. One of the most important methods to solve these problems is to utilize self-compacting cementitious composites instead of the normal concrete. Due to their benefits of these new materials, such as high tensile, compressive, and flexural strength, have drawn the researchers' attention to this type of cementitious composite more than ever. In this experimental investigation, six mixing designs were selected as a base to acquire the best mechanical properties. Moreover, forty-eight rectangular composite panels with dimensions of 300 mm × 400 mm and two thickness values of 30 mm and 50 mm were cast and tested to compare the flexural and impact energy absorption. Steel fibers with volume fractions of 0%, 0.5% and 1% and with lengths of 25 mm and 50 mm were imposed in order to prepare the required cement composites. In this research, the composite panels with two thicknesses of 30 mm and 50 mm, classified into 12 different groups, were cast and tested under three-point flexural bending and repeated drop weight impact test, respectively. Also, the examination and comparison of flexural energy absorption with impact energy absorption were one of the other aims of this research. The obtained results showed that the addition of fibers of longer length improved the mechanical properties of specimens. On the other hand, the findings of the flexural and impact test on the self-compacting composite panels indicated a stronger influence of the long-length fibers.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.441-456
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• 2023

Aiming at the development trend of light weight and high strength of engineering structures, this paper experimentally investigated the seismic performance of circular-in-square high-strength concrete-filled double skin steel tubular (HCFDST) stub columns with out-of-code width-to-thickness (B/t) ratios. Typical failure mode of HCFDST stub columns appeared with the infill material crushing, steel fracture and local buckling of outer tubes as well as the inner buckling of inner tubes. Subsequently, the detailed analysis on hysteretic curves, skeleton curves and ductility, energy dissipation, stiffness degradation and lateral force reduction was conducted to reflect the influences of hollow ratios, axial compression ratios and infill types, e.g., increasing hollow ratio from 0.54 to 0.68 and 0.82 made a slight effect on bearing capacity compared to the ductility coefficients; the higher axial compression ratio (e.g., 0.3 versus 0.1) significantly reduced the average bearing capacity and ductility; the HCFDST column SCFST-6 filled with concrete obviously displayed the larger initial secant stiffness with a percentage 34.20% than the column SCFST-2 using engineered cementitious composite (ECC); increasing hollow ratios, axial compression ratios could accelerate the drop speed of stiffness degradation. The out-of-code HCFDST stub columns with reasonable design could behave favorable hysteretic performance. A theoretical model considering the tensile strength effect of ECC was thereafter established and verified to predict the moment-resisting capacity of HCFDST columns using ECC. The reported research on circular-in-square HCFDST stub columns can provide significant references to the structural application and design.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.135-151
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• 2023

Using 3D asphalt pavement surface data, a deep and multiscale network named CrackNet-M is proposed in this paper for pixel-level crack detection for improvements in both accuracy and robustness. The CrackNet-M consists of four function-specific architectural modules: a central branch net (CBN), a crack map enhancement (CME) module, three pooling feature pyramids (PFP), and an output layer. The CBN maintains crack boundaries using no pooling reductions throughout all convolutional layers. The CME applies a pooling layer to enhance potential thin cracks for better continuity, consuming no data loss and attenuation when working jointly with CBN. The PFP modules implement direct down-sampling and pyramidal up-sampling with multiscale contexts specifically for the detection of thick cracks and exclusion of non-crack patterns. Finally, the output layer is optimized with a skip layer supervision technique proposed to further improve the network performance. Compared with traditional supervisions, the skip layer supervision brings about not only significant performance gains with respect to both accuracy and robustness but a faster convergence rate. CrackNet-M was trained on a total of 2,500 pixel-wise annotated 3D pavement images and finely scaled with another 200 images with full considerations on accuracy and efficiency. CrackNet-M can potentially achieve crack detection in real-time with a processing speed of 40 ms/image. The experimental results on 500 testing images demonstrate that CrackNet-M can effectively detect both thick and thin cracks from various pavement surfaces with a high level of Precision (94.28%), Recall (93.89%), and F-measure (94.04%). In addition, the proposed CrackNet-M compares favorably to other well-developed networks with respect to the detection of thin cracks as well as the removal of shoulder drop-offs.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.109-118
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• 2024

A solar concentrator is a reflective surface in the shape of a parabola that collects solar rays in a focal area. This concentrator follows the path of the sun during the day with the help of a tracking system. One of the most important issues in the design and construction of these reflectors is the force exerted by the wind. This force can sometimes disrupt the stability of the concentrator and overturn the entire system. One of the ways to estimate the force is to use the numerical solution of the air flow in three dimensions around the dish. Ansys Fluent simulation software has been used for modeling several angles of attack between 0 and 180 with respect to the horizon. From the comparison of the velocity vector lines on the dish at angles of 90 to - 90 degrees, it was found that the flow lines are more concentrated inside the dish and there is a tendency for the flow to escape around in the radial direction, which indicates the presence of more pressure distribution inside the dish. It was observed that the pressure on the concave surface was higher than the convex one. Then, the effect of adding a hole with various diameter of 200, 300, 400, 500, and 600 mm on the dish was investigated. By increasing the diameter up to the optimized size of 400 mm, a decrease in the maximum pressure value in the pressure distribution was shown inside the dish. This pressure drop decreased the drag coefficient. The effect of the hole on the dish was also investigated for the 30-degree angled dish, and it was found that the results of the 90-degree case should be considered as the basis of the design.