• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.297-319
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• 2013

Two destructive earthquakes occurred on October 23 and November 9, 2011 in Van province of Turkey. The damage in residential units shows significant deviation from the expectation of decreasing damage with increasing distance to epicenter. The most damaged settlement Ercis has the same distance to the epicenter with Muradiye, where no damage occurred while relatively less damage observed in Van having half distance. These three cities seem to have resembling soil conditions. If the damages are evaluated: joint failures and insufficient lap splice lengths are observed to be the main causes of the total collapses in RC buildings. Additionally, low concrete strength, reinforcement detailing mistakes, soft story, heavy overhang, pounding and short columns are among other damage reasons. Examples of damages due to non-structural elements are also given. Remarkable points about seismic damages are: collapsed buildings with shear-walls, heavily damaged buildings despite adequate concrete strength due to detailing mistakes, undamaged two-story adobe buildings close to totally collapsed RC ones and undamaged structural system in buildings with heavily damaged non-structural elements. On the contrary of the common belief that buildings with shear-walls are immune to total collapse among civil engineers, collapse of Gedikbulak primary school is a noteworthy example.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.429-437
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• 2023

This paper studied the prediction of structural damage indices to buildings after earthquake occurrence using Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and Fuzzy Linear Regression (FLR) methods. Particularly, the structural damage degree, represented by the Maximum Inter Story Drift Ratio (MISDR), is an essential factor that ensures the safety of the building. Thus, the seismic response of a steel building was evaluated, utilizing 65 seismic accelerograms as input signals. Among the several response quantities, the focus is on the MISDR, which expresses the postseismic damage status. Using MLR and FLR methods and comparing the outputs with the corresponding evaluated by nonlinear dynamic analyses, it was concluded that the FLR method had the most accurate prediction results in contrast to the MLR method. A blind prediction applying a set of another 10 artificial accelerograms also examined the model's effectiveness. The results revealed that the use of the FLR method had the smallest average percentage error level for every set of applied accelerograms, and thus it is a suitable modeling tool in earthquake engineering.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 1991.04a
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• pp.61-67
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• 1991

Conventional aseismic design methods of reinforced concrete frame all but disregard the state of damage over the entire building frame. This paper presents an automated damage-contorlled design method, which aims for uniform damage distribution throughout the entire building frame, as measured by the individual mumber damage indexes. Three design parameters, namely the longitudinal steel ratio, the confinement steel ratio and the frame member depth, were studied for their influence on the frame responce to an earthquake. The usefulness of this design method is demonstrated with a four story example office building predicting the extent of structural damage.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.68 no.5
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• pp.621-632
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• 2018

Soft-story buildings have bottom stories much less rigid than the top stories and are susceptible to earthquake damage. Therefore, the seismic design specifications need strict design considerations in such cases. In this paper, a four-story building was investigated as a case study and the effects of X-braces elimination in its lower stories studied. In addition, the possibility of replacement of the X-braces in soft-stories with equivalent moment resisting frame inspected in two different phases. In first phase, the stiffness of X-braces and equivalent moment-resisting frames evaluated using classic equations. In final phase, diagonals removed from the lowest story to develop a soft-story and replaced with moment resisting frames. Then, the seismic stiffness variation of moment-resisting frame evaluated using nonlinear static and dynamic analyses. The results show that substitution of braced frames with an equivalent moment-resisting frame of the same stiffness increases story drift and reduces energy absorption capacity. However, it is enough to consider the needs of building codes, even using equivalent moment resisting frame instead of X-Braces, to avoid soft-story stiffness irregularity in seismic design of buildings. Besides, soft-story development in the second story may be more critical under strong ground excitations, because of interaction of adjacent stories.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.529-540
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• 2018

The influences of initial damage paths and aftershock (AS) spectral shape on the assessment of AS collapse fragility are investigated. To do this, a four-story ductile reinforced concrete (RC) frame structure is employed as the study case. The far-field earthquake records recommended by FEMA P695 are used as AS ground motions. The AS incremental dynamic analyses are performed for the damaged structure. To examine the effect of initial damage paths, a total of six kinds of initial damage paths are adopted to simulate different initial damage states of the structure by pushover analysis and dynamic analysis. For the pushover-based initial damage paths, the structure is "pushed" using either uniform or triangle lateral load pattern to a specified damage state quantified by the maximum inter-story drift ratio. Among the dynamic initial damage paths, one single mainshock ground motion or a suite of mainshock ground motions are used in the incremental dynamic analyses to generate a specified initial damage state to the structure. The results show that the structure collapse capacity is reduced as the increase of initial damage, and the initial damage paths show a significant effect on the calculated collapse capacities of the damaged structure (especially at severe damage states). To account for the effect of AS spectral shape, the AS collapse fragility can be adjusted at different target values of ${\varepsilon}$ by using the linear correlation model between the collapse capacity (in term of spectral intensity) and the AS ${\varepsilon}$ values, and coefficients of this linear model is found to be associated with the initial damage states.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.1055-1075
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• 2015

In order to investigate the accuracy and applicability of steel equivalent constitutive model, the calculated results were compared with typical tests of steel frames under static and dynamic loading patterns firstly. Secondly, four widely used models for time history analysis of steel frames were compared to discuss the applicability and efficiency of different methods, including shell element model, multi-scale model, equivalent constitutive model (ECM) and traditional beam element model (especially bilinear model). Four-story steel frame models of above-mentioned finite element methods were established. The structural deformation, failure modes and the computational efficiency of different models were compared. Finally, the equivalent constitutive model was applied in seismic incremental dynamic analysis of a ten-floor steel frame and compared with the cyclic hardening model without considering damage and degradation. Meanwhile, the effects of damage and degradation on the seismic performance of steel frame were discussed in depth. The analysis results showed that: damages would lead to larger deformations. Therefore, when the calculated results of steel structures subjected to rare earthquake without considering damage were close to the collapse limit, the actual story drift of structure might already exceed the limit, leading to a certain security risk. ECM could simulate the damage and degradation behaviors of steel structures more accurately, and improve the calculation accuracy of traditional beam element model with acceptable computational efficiency.

• Magazine of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.111-119
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• 1991

Most of the conventional aseismic design methods for reinforced concrete structures, based on the strong¬column weak-beam design concept, do not necessarily the state of damage distribution over the entire frame. This paper introduces a seismic damage-controlled design method for RC frames which aim at individual member damage indices. Three design parameters, namely the longitudinal steel ratio, the confinement steel ratio and the frame member depth, were studied for their influence on the frame response to an earthquake. The usefulness of this design method will be demonstrated with a three-bay four-story building frame so that, on the one hand, the method will reduce the damage as measured by the global damage index under the same earthquake and, on the other hand, will lead to a larger capacity enabling stronger earthquakes to be accom¬odated .

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.113-136
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• 2009

The seismic induced interaction between multistory structures with unequal story heights (inter-story pounding) is studied taking into account the local response of the exterior beam-column joints. Although several parameters that influence the structural pounding have been studied sofar, the role of the joints local inelastic behaviour has not been yet investigated in the literature as key parameter for the pounding problem. Moreover, the influence of the infill panels as an additional parameter for the local damage effect of the joints on the inter-story pounding phenomenon is examined. Thirty six interaction cases between a multistory frame structure and an adjacent shorter and stiffer structure are studied for two different seismic excitations. The results are focused: (a) on the local response of the critical external column of the multistory structure that suffers the hit from the slab of the adjacent shorter structure, and (b) on the local response of the exterior beam-column joints of the multistory structure. Results of this investigation demonstrate that the possible local inelastic response of the exterior joints may be in some cases beneficial for the seismic behaviour of the critical column that suffers the impact. However, in all the examined cases the developing demands for deformation of the exterior joints are substantially increased and severe damages can be observed due to the pounding effect. The presence of the masonry infill panels has also been proved as an important parameter for the response of the exterior beam-column joints and thus for the safety of the building. Nevertheless, in all the examined inter-story pounding cases the presence of the infills was not enough for the total amelioration of the excessive demands for shear and ductility of the column that suffers the impact.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.329-350
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• 2016

A parametric study was conducted to investigate the seismic deformation demands in terms of drift ratio, plastic base rotation and compression strain on rectangular wall members in frame-wall systems. The wall index defined as ratio of total wall area to the floor plan area was kept as variable in frame-wall models and its relation with the seismic demand at the base of the wall was investigated. The wall indexes of analyzed models are in the range of 0.2-2%. 4, 8 and 12-story frame-wall models were created. The seismic behavior of frame-wall models were calculated using nonlinear time-history analysis and design spectrum matched ground motion set. Analyses results revealed that the increased wall index led to significant reduction in the top and inter-story displacement demands especially for 4-story models. The calculated average inter-story drift decreased from 1.5% to 0.5% for 4-story models. The average drift ratio in 8- and 12-story models has changed from approximately 1.5% to 0.75%. As the wall index increases, the dispersion in the calculated drifts due to ground motion variability decreased considerably. This is mainly due to increase in the lateral stiffness of models that leads their fundamental period of vibration to fall into zone of the response spectra that has smaller dispersion for scaled ground motion data set. When walls were assessed according to plastic rotation limits defined in ASCE/SEI 41, it was seen that the walls in frame-wall systems with low wall index in the range of 0.2-0.6% could seldom survive the design earthquake without major damage. Concrete compressive strains calculated in all frame-wall structures were much higher than the limit allowed for design, ${\varepsilon}_c$=0.0035, so confinement is required at the boundaries. For rectangular walls above the wall index value of 1.0% nearly all walls assure at least life safety (LS) performance criteria. It is proposed that in the design of dual systems where frames and walls are connected by link and transverse beams, the minimum value of wall index should be greater than 0.6%, in order to prevent excessive damage to wall members.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.6
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• pp.811-824
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• 2022

Despite its disadvantages, soft story can reduce the damage to the upper floors by concentrating drift in that specific story provided that large drifts are avoided. Gapped-Inclined Brace (GIB) with reduced P-delta effects and the control of soft story stiffness makes it possible to take advantage of the soft story in buildings and increase their capacity for energy dissipation. OpenSees software is used in this study to validate and modify the GIB model's shortcomings. Also, the analysis method for this element is changed for design. The modified element is evaluated in 3D analysis. Finally, to retrofit an existing building, this element is used. Based on the Iranian seismic code, a six-story reinforced concrete building is modelled and studied with 3D analysis. In this building, the construction shortcomings and elimination of infills on the ground floor cause the formation of a soft story. Results of nonlinear static analysis, nonlinear dynamic, and incremental dynamic analysis using both components of seismic acceleration applied to the structure at different angles and the fragility curves indicate the improvement of the retrofitted structure's performance using the modified element to reach the required performance level following the retrofit code.