• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.789-830
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• 2015

The recent re-assessment of the seismic hazard in Europe led for many regions of low to moderate seismicity to an increase in the seismic demand. As a consequence, several modern unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings, constructed with reinforced concrete (RC) slabs that provide an efficient rigid diaphragm action, no longer satisfy the seismic design check and have been retrofitted by adding or replacing URM walls with RC walls. Of late, also several new construction projects have been conceived directly as buildings with both RC and URM walls. Despite the widespread use of such construction technique, very little is known about the seismic behaviour of mixed RC-URM wall structures and codes do not provide adequate support to designers. The aim of the paper is therefore to propose a displacement-based design methodology for the design of mixed RC-URM edifices and the retrofit of URM buildings by replacing or adding selected URM walls with RC ones. The article describes also two tools developed for estimating important quantities relevant for the displacement-based design of structures with both RC and URM walls. The tools are (i) a mechanical model based on the shear-flexure interaction between URM and RC walls and (ii) an elastic model for estimating the contribution of the RC slabs to the overturning moment capacity of the system. In the last part of the article the proposed design method is verified through nonlinear dynamic analyses of several case studies. These results show that the proposed design approach has the ability of controlling the displacement profile of the designed structures, avoiding concentration of deformations in one single storey, a typical feature of URM wall structures.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.473-480
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• 2011

Recently, the resizing algorithms based on the displacement participation factors have been developed for sizing members to satisfy stiffness criteria. It is proved that this resizing algorithms made for utilizing worker's stiffness design are practical and rational due to the simplicity and convenience of the method. The resizing algorithm can be practically and effectively applied to drift design of buildings. However, the researches on the change of inelastic behavior by the resizing algorithm has been insufficient. To identify the effect on the inelastic behavior of buildings by the resizing method, this study used the reinforced concrete shear wall-frame example. Through the application of the resizing method, the weights of shear wall in the lower class and the weights of columns and beams in the upper class increased respectively. And the initial stiffness of the building increased and the ductility of the buildings had similar with that of the initial structure.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.106-115
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• 2011

This study proposed a new methodology for seismic capacity evaluation of low-rise reinforced concrete (RC) buildings based on non-linear required spectrum. In order to verify the reliability of the proposed method, relationships between results obtained using the proposed method and the non-linear dynamic analyses were investigated. Compared with the seismic protection index (Es=0.6) defined in the Japanese Standard, the applicability of the method was also estimated. Research results indicate that the method proposed in this study compares reasonably well with the detailed evaluation methods. Using the seismic evaluation method developed in this study, the seismic capacity category and earthquake damage degree of low-rise RC buildings corresponding to a specific earthquake level can be effectively estimated.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.141-157
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• 2014

The Conditional Mean Spectrum represents a powerful link between the seismic hazard information and the selection of strong ground motion records at a particular site. The scope of the paper is to apply for the city of Bucharest for the first time the method to obtain the Conditional Mean Spectrum (CMS) presented by Baker (2011) and to select, on the basis of the CMS, a suite of strong ground motions for performing elastic and inelastic dynamic analyses of buildings and structures with fundamental periods of vibration in the vicinity of 1.0 s. The major seismic hazard for Bucharest and for most of Southern and Eastern Romania is dominated by the Vrancea subcrustal seismic source. The ground motion prediction equation developed for subduction-type earthquakes and soil conditions by Youngs et al. (1997) is used for the computation of the Uniform Hazard Spectrum (UHS) and the CMS. The disaggregation of seismic hazard is then performed in order to determine the mean causal values of magnitude and source-to-site distance for a particular spectral ordinate (for a spectral period T = 1.0 s in this study). The spectral period of 1.0 s is considered to be representative for the new stock of residential and office reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Bucharest. The differences between the Uniform Hazard Spectrum (UHS) and the Conditional Mean Spectrum (CMS) are discussed taking into account the scarcity of ground motions recorded in the region of Bucharest and the frequency content characteristics of the recorded data. Moreover, a record selection based on the criteria proposed by Baker and Cornell (2006) and Baker (2011) is performed using a dataset consisting of strong ground motions recorded during seven Vrancea seismic events.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.4
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• pp.429-438
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• 2017

Structural design has an imperative role in deciding the failure possibility of a Reinforced Concrete (RC) structure. Recent research works achieved the goal of predicting the structural failure of the RC structure with the assistance of machine learning techniques. Previously, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been trained supported by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to classify RC structures with reasonable accuracy. Though, keeping in mind the sensitivity in predicting the structural failure, more accurate models are still absent in the context of Machine Learning. Since the efficiency of multi-objective optimization over single objective optimization techniques is well established. Thus, the motivation of the current work is to employ a Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) to train the Neural Network (NN) based model. In the present work, the NN has been trained with MOGA to minimize the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Maximum Error (ME) toward optimizing the weight vector of the NN. The model has been tested by using a dataset consisting of 150 RC structure buildings. The proposed NN-MOGA based model has been compared with Multi-layer perceptron-feed-forward network (MLP-FFN) and NN-PSO based models in terms of several performance metrics. Experimental results suggested that the NN-MOGA has outperformed other existing well known classifiers with a reasonable improvement over them. Meanwhile, the proposed NN-MOGA achieved the superior accuracy of 93.33% and F-measure of 94.44%, which is superior to the other classifiers in the present study.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.505-526
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• 2005

The influence of the inter-story structural pounding on the seismic behaviour of adjacent multistory reinforced concrete structures with unequal total heights and different story heights is investigated. Although inter-story pounding is a common case in practice, it has not been studied before in the literature as far as the authors are aware. Fifty two pounding cases, each one for two different seismic excitations, are examined. From the results it can be deduced that: (i) The most important issue in the inter-story pounding is the local effect on the external column of the tall building that suffers the impact from the upper floor slab of the adjacent shorter structure. (ii) The ductility demands for this column are increased comparing with the ones without the pounding effect. In the cases that the two buildings are in contact these demands appear to be critical since they are higher than the available ductility values. In the cases that there is a small distance between the interacting buildings the ductility demands of this column are also higher than the ones of the same column without the pounding effect but they appear to be lower than the available ductility values. (iii) It has to be stressed that in all the examined cases the developed shear forces of this column exceeded the shear strength. Thus, it can be concluded that in inter-story pounding cases the column that suffers the impact is always in a critical condition due to shear action and, furthermore, in the cases that the two structures are in contact from the beginning this column appears to be critical due to high ductility demands as well. The consequences of the impact can be very severe for the integrity of the column and may be a primary cause for the initiation of the collapse of the structure. This means that special measures have to be taken in the design process first for the critically increased shear demands and secondly for the high ductility demands.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.3-10
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• 2010

This study evaluates the seismic performance of reinforced concrete (RC) flat plate structures relation to the gravity shear ratio. For this purpose, 3 and 7 story framed buildings were designed for gravity loads only. Subsequently, a nonlinear static pushover analysis and a nonlinear time history analysis for the prototype buildings were carried out. In the nonlinear analysis, newly propose analytical slab-column joint model was utilized to capture punching shear failure and fracture mechanism in the analysis. The analytical results showed that seismic performance of RC flat plate frame is strongly influenced by the gravity shear ratio. In particularly, in the RC flat plate frame with a large gravity shear ratio the lateral strength and maximum drift capacity decreased significantly.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2016

The reinforced-concrete multi-story shear-wall structure, which can free a building from beams and columns to allow the planning of a vast room, has increasingly been used in Japan as a high-rise reinforced-concrete structure. Since this structural system concentrates the seismic force onto multi-story shear walls inside, the bending deformation of the walls may cause excessive deformation on the upper floors during an earthquake. However, it is possible to control the bending deformation to within a certain level by setting high-strength and rigid beams (outriggers) at the top of the multi-story shear walls; these outriggers restrain the bending behavior of the walls. Moreover, it is possible to achieve high energy dissipation by placing vibration control devices on the outriggers and thus restrain the bending behavior. This paper outlines the earthquake response analysis of a high-rise residential tower to demonstrate the effectiveness of the outrigger frame incorporating vibration control devices.

• 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.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.723-740
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• 2016

Reinforced concrete corbels are generally used to transfer loads within a structural system, such as buildings, bridges, and facilities in general. They commonly present low aspect ratio, requiring an accurate model for shear strength prediction in order to promote flexural behavior. The model described here, originally developed for walls, was adapted for corbels. The model is based on a reinforced concrete panel, described by constitutive laws for concrete and steel and applied in a fixed direction. Equilibrium in the orthogonal direction to the shearing force allows for the estimation of the shear stress versus strain response. The original model yielded conservative results with important scatter, thus various modifications were implemented in order to improve strength predictions: 1) recalibration of the strut (crack) direction, capturing the absence of transverse reinforcement and axial load in most corbels, 2) inclusion of main (boundary) reinforcement in the equilibrium equation, capturing its participation in the mechanism, and 3) decrease in aspect ratio by considering the width of the loading plate in the formulation. To analyze the behavior of the theoretical model, a database of 109 specimens available in the literature was collected. The model yielded an average model-to-test shear strength ratio of 0.98 and a coefficient of variation of 0.16, showing also that most test variables are well captured with the model, and providing better results than the original model. The model strength prediction is compared with other models in the literature, resulting in one of the most accurate estimates.