• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.369-387
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• 2016

In this work, random homogenization analysis for the effective thermal properties of a three-dimensional composite material with unidirectional fibers is presented by combining the equivalent inclusion method with Random Factor Method (RFM). The randomness of the micro-structural morphology and constituent material properties as well as the correlation among these random parameters are completely accounted for, and stochastic effective thermal properties as thermal expansion coefficients as well as their correlation are then sought. Results from the RFM and the Monte-Carlo Method (MCM) are compared. The impact of randomness and correlation of the micro-structural parameters on the random homogenized results is revealed by two methods simultaneously, and some important conclusions are obtained.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.65 no.6
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• pp.771-784
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• 2018

This study aims to investigate the stochastic response of isolated and non-isolated highway bridges subjected to spatially varying earthquake ground motion model. This model includes wave passage, incoherence and site response effects. The wave passage effect is examined by using various wave velocities. The incoherency effect is investigated by considering the Harichandran and Vanmarcke coherency model. The site response effect is considered by selecting homogeneous firm, medium and soft soil types where the bridge supports are constructed. The ground motion is described by power spectral density function and applied to each support point. Triple concave friction pendulum (TCFP) bearing which is more effective than other seismic isolation systems is used for seismic isolation. To implement seismic isolation procedure, TCFP bearing devices are placed at each of the support points of the deck. In the analysis, the bridge selected is a five-span featuring cast-in-place concrete box girder superstructure supported on reinforced concrete columns. Foundation supported highway bridge is regarded as three regions and compared its different situation in the stochastic analysis. The stochastic analyses results show that spatially varying ground motion has important effects on the stochastic response of the isolated and non-isolated bridges as long span structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.381-394
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• 2003

While constructing multistorey buildings with reinforced concrete framed structures it is a common practice to provide parking space for vehicles at the ground floor level. This floor will generally consist of open frames without any infilled walls and is called an open-storey. From a post disaster damage survey carried out, it was noticed that during the January 26, 2001 Bhuj (Gujarat, India) earthquake, a large number of reinforced concrete framed buildings with open-storey at ground floor level, suffered extensive damage and in some cases catastrophic collapse. This has brought into sharp focus the need to carry out systematic studies on the seismic vulnerability of such buildings. Determination of vulnerability requires realistic structural response estimations taking into account the stochasticity in the loading and the system parameters. The stochastic finite element method can be effectively used to model the random fields while carrying out such studies. This paper presents the details of stochastic finite element analysis of a five-storey three-bay reinforced concrete framed structure with open-storey subjected to standard seismic excitation. In the present study, only the stochasticity in the system parameters is considered. The stochastic finite element method used for carrying out the analysis is based on perturbation technique. Each random field representing the stochastic geometry/material property is discretised into correlated random variables using spatial averaging technique. The uncertainties in geometry and material properties are modelled using the first two moments of the corresponding parameters. In evaluating the stochastic response, the cross-sectional area and Young' modulus are considered as independent random fields. To study the influence of correlation length of random fields, different correlation lengths are considered for random field discretisation. The spatial expectations and covariances for displacement response at any time instant are obtained as the output. The effect of open-storey is modelled by suitably considering the stiffness of infilled walls in the upper storey using cross bracing. In order to account for changes in soil conditions during strong motion earthquakes, both fixed and hinged supports are considered. The results of the stochastic finite element based seismic analysis of reinforced concrete framed structures reported in this paper demonstrate the importance of considering the effect of open-storey with appropriate support conditions to estimate the realistic response of buildings subjected to earthquakes.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.307-329
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• 2013

The bending problem of Euler-Bernoulli discontinuous beams is dealt with, in which the discontinuities are due to the loads and eventually to essential constrains applied along the beam axis. In particular, the loads are modelled as random delta-correlated processes acting along the beam axis, while the ulterior eventual discontinuities are produced by the presence of external rollers applied along the beam axis. This kind of structural model can be considered in the static study of bridge beams. In the present work the exact expression of the response quantities are given in terms of means and variances, thanks to the use of the stochastic analysis rules and to the use of the generalized functions. The knowledge of the means and the variances of the internal forces implies the possibility of applying the reliability ${\beta}$-method for verifying the beam.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.125-135
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• 2004

Industrial structure systems may have nonlinearity, and are also sometimes exposed to the danger of random excitation. This paper proposes a method to analyze response and reliability design of a complex nonlinear structure system under random excitation. The nonlinear structure system which is subjected to random process is modeled by finite element method. The nonlinear equations are expanded sequentially using the perturbation theory. Then, the perturbed equations are solved in probabilistic methods. Several statistical properties of random process that are of interest in random vibration applications are reviewed in accordance with the nonlinear stochastic problem.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.17 no.3_4
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• pp.593-609
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• 2004

Peak response is a more suitable index than mean response in the light of structural safety. In this study, a controller optimization method is proposed to restrict peak responses of building structures subject to earthquake excitations, which are modeled as partially stationary stochastic process. The constraints are given with specified failure probabilities of peak responses. LQR is chosen to assure stability in numerical process of optimization. Optimization problem is formulated with weightings on controlled outputs as design variables and gradients of objective and constraint functions are derived. Full state feedback controllers designed by the proposed method satisfy various design objectives and output feedback controllers using LQG also yield similar results without significant performance deterioration.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.147-160
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• 2007

In this paper, a dynamic analysis based on the fuzzy set theory is presented as a possible complementary tool to the classical stochastic methods for dynamic analyses. Material parameters of a structure are influenced by uncertainties and therefore they are considered to be fuzzy quantities with given distributions, that means fuzzy numbers with given membership functions. The fuzzy dynamic analysis is conducted with help of fuzzy arithmetic defined on the so-called ${\alpha}$-cuts. The results of the analysis are also obtained in the form of fuzzy numbers, which compared to the stochastic methods is less computationaly expensive while at the same time they still provide information about the distribution of a quantity. This method is demonstrated on an analysis of a two-dimensional frame subjected to possible seismic load, where the uncertain eigenmodes and eigenfrequencies are used in the modal analysis.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.315-332
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• 2011

The Combined Deterministic Stochastic Subspace based System Identification Technique (CDSSSIT) is a powerful input-output system identification technique which is known to be always convergent and numerically stable. The technique determines a Kalman state sequence from the projection of the output-input data. The state space matrices are determied subsequently from this Kalman state sequence using least squares. The objective of this paper is to examine the efficiency of the CDSSSIT in identifying the modal parameters (frequencies and mode shapes) of a stiff structure. The results show that the CDSSSIT predicts the modal parameters of stiff buildings quite accurately but is very sensitive to the location of sensors.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.85-110
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• 2005

This paper aims at formulating various statistical models for the study of a ten year Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) data collected from various WIM stations in Hong Kong. In order to study the bridge live load model it is important to determine the mathematical distributions of different load affecting parameters such as gross vehicle weights, axle weights, axle spacings, average daily number of trucks etc. Each of the above parameters is analyzed by various stochastic processes in order to obtain the mathematical distributions and the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) method is adopted to calculate the statistical parameters, expected values and standard deviations from the given samples of data. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) method of approach is used to check the suitability of the statistical model selected for the particular parameter and the Monte Carlo method is used to simulate the distributions of maximum value stochastic processes of a series of given stochastic processes. Using the statistical analysis approach the maximum value of gross vehicle weight and axle weight in bridge design life has been determined and the distribution functions of these parameters are obtained under both free-flowing traffic and dense traffic status. The maximum value of bending moments and shears for wide range of simple spans are obtained by extrapolation. It has been observed that the obtained maximum values of the gross vehicle weight and axle weight from this study are very close to their legal limitations of Hong Kong which are 42 tonnes for gross weight and 10 tonnes for axle weight.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.25-41
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• 2012

Kriging surrogate model provides explicit functions to represent the relationships between the inputs and outputs of a linear or nonlinear system, which is a desirable advantage for response estimation and parameter identification in structural design and model updating problem. However, little research has been carried out in applying Kriging model to crack identification. In this work, a scheme for crack identification based on a Kriging surrogate model is proposed. A modified rectangular grid (MRG) is introduced to move some sample points lying on the boundary into the internal design region, which will provide more useful information for the construction of Kriging model. The initial Kriging model is then constructed by samples of varying crack parameters (locations and sizes) and their corresponding modal frequencies. For identifying crack parameters, a robust stochastic particle swarm optimization (SPSO) algorithm is used to find the global optimal solution beyond the constructed Kriging model. To improve the accuracy of surrogate model, the finite element (FE) analysis soft ANSYS is employed to deal with the re-meshing problem during surrogate model updating. Specially, a simple method for crack number identification is proposed by finding the maximum probability factor. Finally, numerical simulations and experimental research are performed to assess the effectiveness and noise immunity of this proposed scheme.