• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.149-165
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• 2016

Floods have been known to be one of the main causes of bridge collapse. Contrary to earthquakes, flood events tend to occur repeatedly and more frequently in rainfall areas; flood-induced damage and collapse account for a significant portion of disasters in many countries. Nevertheless, in contrast to extensive research on the seismic fragility analysis for civil infrastructure, relatively little attention has been devoted to the flood-related fragility. The present study proposes a novel methodology for deriving flood fragility curves for bridges. Fragility curves are generally derived by means of structural reliability analysis, and structural failure modes are defined as excessive demands of the displacement ductility of a bridge under increased water pressure resulting from debris accumulation and structural deterioration, which are known to be the primary causes of bridge failures during flood events. Since these bridge failure modes need to be analyzed through sophisticated structural analysis, flood fragility curve derivation that would require repeated finite element analyses may take a long time. To calculate the probability of flood-induced failure of bridges efficiently, in the proposed framework, the first order reliability method (FORM) is employed for reducing the required number of finite element analyses. In addition, two software packages specialized for reliability analysis and finite element analysis, FERUM (Finite Element Reliability Using MATLAB) and ABAQUS, are coupled so that they can exchange their inputs and outputs during structural reliability analysis, and a Python-based interface for FERUM and ABAQUS is newly developed to effectively coordinate the fragility analysis. The proposed framework of flood fragility analysis is applied to an actual reinforced concrete bridge in South Korea to demonstrate the detailed procedure of the approach.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.503-515
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• 2022

This paper presents the development of seismic fragility curves for a precast reinforced concrete bridge instrumented with a structural health monitoring (SHM) system. The bridge is located near an active seismic fault in the Dominican Republic (DR) and provides the only access to several local communities in the aftermath of a potential damaging earthquake; moreover, the sample bridge was designed with outdated building codes and uses structural detailing not adequate for structures in seismic regions. The bridge was instrumented with an SHM system to extract information about its state of structural integrity and estimate its seismic performance. The data obtained from the SHM system is integrated with structural models to develop a set of fragility curves to be used as a quantitative measure of the expected damage; the fragility curves provide an estimate of the probability that the structure will exceed different damage limit states as a function of an earthquake intensity measure. To obtain the fragility curves a digital twin of the bridge is developed combining a computational finite element model and the information extracted from the SHM system. The digital twin is used as a response prediction tool that minimizes modeling uncertainty, significantly improving the predicting capability of the model and the accuracy of the fragility curves. The digital twin was used to perform a nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) with selected ground motions that are consistent with the seismic fault and site characteristics. The fragility curves show that for the maximum expected acceleration (with a 2% probability of exceedance in 50 years) the structure has a 62% probability of undergoing extensive damage. This is the first study presenting fragility curves for civil infrastructure in the DR and the proposed methodology can be extended to other structures to support disaster mitigation and post-disaster decision-making strategies.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.85 no.4
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• pp.469-484
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• 2023

A deep recursive bidirectional Cuda Deep Neural Network Long Short Term Memory (Bi-CuDNNLSTM) layer is recruited in this paper to predict the entire force time histories, and the corresponding hysteresis and backbone curves of reinforced concrete (RC) bridge piers using experimental fast and slow cyclic tests. The proposed stacked Bi-CuDNNLSTM layers involve multiple uncertain input variables, including horizontal actuator displacements, vertical actuators axial loads, the effective height of the bridge pier, the moment of inertia, and mass. The functional application programming interface in the Keras Python library is utilized to develop a deep learning model considering all the above various input attributes. To have a robust and reliable prediction, the dataset for both the fast and slow cyclic tests is split into three mutually exclusive subsets of training, validation, and testing (unseen). The whole datasets include 17 RC bridge piers tested experimentally ten for fast and seven for slow cyclic tests. The results bring to light that the mean absolute error, as a loss function, is monotonically decreased to zero for both the training and validation datasets after 5000 epochs, and a high level of correlation is observed between the predicted and the experimentally measured values of the force time histories for all the datasets, more than 90%. It can be concluded that the maximum mean of the normalized error, obtained through Box-Whisker plot and Gaussian distribution of normalized error, associated with unseen data is about 10% and 3% for the fast and slow cyclic tests, respectively. In recapitulation, it brings to an end that the stacked Bi-CuDNNLSTM layer implemented in this study has a myriad of benefits in reducing the time and experimental costs for conducting new fast and slow cyclic tests in the future and results in a fast and accurate insight into hysteretic behavior of bridge piers.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.511-520
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• 2007

There is a concern with worldwide deterioration of highway bridges, particularly reinforced concrete. The advantages of fibre reinforced plastic(FRP) composites over conventional materials motivate their use in highway bridges for replacement of structures. Recently, an FRP deck has been installed on a state highway, located in New York State, as an experimental project. In this paper, a systematic approach for analysis of this FRP deck bridge is presented. Multi-step linear numerical analyses have been performed using the finite element method to study the structural behavior and the possible failure mechanism of the FRP deck-superstructure system. Deck's self-weight and ply orientations at the interface between steel girders and FRP deck are considered in this study. From this research, the results of the numerical analyses were corroborated with field test results. Analytical results reveal several potential failure mechanism for the FRP deck and truss bridge system. The results presented in this study may be used to propose engineering design guideline for new and replacement FRP bridge deck structure.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Advanced Composite Structures
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.10-16
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• 2010

In construction industries, new construction materials are needed to overcome some problems associated with the use of conventional construction materials due to the change of environmental and social requirements. Accordingly, the requirements to be satisfied in the design of civil engineering structures are diversified. As a new construction material in the civil engineering industries, fiber reinforced polymeric plastic (FRP) has a superior corrosion resistance, high specific strength/stiffness, etc. Therefore, such properties can be used to mitigate the problems associated with the use of conventional construction materials. Nowadays, new types of bridge piers and marine piles are being studied for new construction. They are usually made of concrete filled fiber reinforced polymeric plastic tubes (CFFT). In this paper, a new type of FRP-concrete composite pile which is composed of reinforced concrete filled FRP tube (RCFFT) is proposed to improve compressive strength as well as flexural strength. The load carrying capacity of proposed RCFFT compression member is discussed based on the result of experimental and analytical investigations.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.35-42
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• 2011

The seismic design of solid reinforced concrete bridge columns has been committed to, based on accumulated research and design specifications. The rational confinement model and seismic performance evaluation, however, are insufficient because of the lack of domestic and foreign design specifications about the experimental and analytical difficulties in the case of circular hollow reinforced concrete columns. In this paper, the seismic behavior of circular hollow reinforced concrete columns and its dependence on design variables are understood and explained. These research results can be used to derive the rational and economical design specifications for circular hollow sectional columns based on the result from the nonlinear analysis program, named RCAHEST (Reinforced Concrete Analysis in Higher Evaluation System Technology).

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.91-102
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• 2007

Through lessons in recent earthquakes, the bridge engineering community recognizes the need for new seismic design methodologies based on the inelastic structural performance of RC bridge structures. This study represents results of performance-based fragility analysis of reinforced concrete (RC) bridge. Monte carlo simulation is performed to study nonlinear dynamic responses of RC bridge. Two-parameter log-normal distribution function is used to represent the fragility curves. These two-parameters, referred to as fragility parameters, are estimated by the traditional maximum likelihood procedure, which is treated each event of RC bridge pier damage as a realization of Bernoulli experiment. In order to formulate the fragility curves, five different damage states are described by two practical factors: the displacement and curvature ductility, which are mostly influencing on the seismic behavior of RC bridge piers. Five damage states are quantitatively assessed in terms of these seismic ductilities on the basis of numerous experimental results of RC bridge piers. Thereby, the performance-based fragility curves of RC bridge pier are provided in this paper. This approach can be used in constructing the fragility curves of various bridge structures and be applied to construct the seismic hazard map.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2004.04a
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• pp.135-142
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• 2004

The apparent advantages of FRP (fiber reinforced plastics) composites over the conventional structural materials may be attributed to their high specific strength and stiffness. Other affordable properties of FRPs including an excellent durability make them particularly attractive for the structures in severe service conditions. Therefore, the material and sectional properties of a FRP structural component should be designed to meet its specific requirements and service conditions. This paper is performed the material property optimization under optimum design of pultruded FRP bridge deck section. In the problem formulation, an objective function is selected to minimize the maximum R(strength ratio). The thickness of layers, volumes of fibers and matrix fiber orientation, and stacking sequence of FRPs are used as the design variables. Strength ratio in the design code, material failure criteria and pultruded manufacture thickness are selected as the design constraints to enhance the material performance of FRP decks. From the results of the numerical investigation, we obtained the optimum deck section profile for conventional using object.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2008.04a
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• pp.301-306
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• 2008

The present seismic analysis of Road-Bridge Design Standard is on a basis of load-vased analysis which lets structures have the strength over load. In this study, the capacity spectrum method, a kind of displacement based method, which is evaluated by displacement of structure, is presented as an alternative to the analysis method based on load. Seismic capacity is performed about the existing reinforced concrete pier which has already secured seismic design by capacity spectrum method. As a result, capacity spectrum method could realistically evaluate the non-elastic behavior of structures easilly and quickly and the displacement of structures for variable ground motion level. And it could efficiently apply to an evaluation of seismic capacity about the existing structures and a verification of design for capacity target of the structure. We propose the seisemic performance method by using the Finite Element Analysis Program.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.129-143
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• 2017

Seismic design of reinforced concrete (RC) structures requires a certain minimum level of flexural ductility. For example, Eurocode EN1998-1 directly specifies a minimum flexural ductility for RC beams, while Chinese code GB50011 limits the equivalent rectangular stress block depth ratio at peak resisting moment to achieve a certain nominal minimum flexural ductility indirectly. Although confinement is effective in improving the ductility of RC beams, most design codes do not provide any guidelines due to the lack of a suitable theory. In this study, the confinement for desirable flexural ductility performance of both normal- and high-strength concrete beams is evaluated based on a rigorous full-range moment-curvature analysis. An effective strategy is proposed for flexural ductility design of RC beams taking into account confinement. The key parameters considered include the maximum difference of tension and compression reinforcement ratios, and maximum neutral axis depth ratio at peak resisting moment. Empirical formulae and tables are then developed to provide guidelines accordingly.