• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.1079-1089
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• 2017

Nuclear power plants under expansion and under construction in China are mostly located in coastal areas, which means they are at risk of suffering strong earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis. This paper presents a safety analysis for a new reinforced concrete containment vessel in such events. A finite element method-based model was built, verified, and first used to understand the seismic performance of the containment vessel under earthquakes with increased intensities. Then, the model was used to assess the safety performance of the containment vessel subject to an earthquake with peak ground acceleration (PGA) of 0.56g and subsequent tsunamis with increased inundation depths, similar to the 2011 Great East earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Results indicated that the containment vessel reached Limit State I (concrete cracking) and Limit State II (concrete crushing) when the PGAs were in a range of 0.8-1.1g and 1.2-1.7g, respectively. The containment vessel reached Limit State I with a tsunami inundation depth of 10 m after suffering an earthquake with a PGA of 0.56g. A site-specific hazard assessment was conducted to consider the likelihood of tsunami sources.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
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• 2000.10a
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• pp.91-97
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• 2000

Once a response spectrum is estimated for the site, if there is a need of generating realistic earthquakes time histories considering seismic sources and path effects, one alternative is to use statistical phase characteristics based on real earthquake records other than assuming arbitrary duration and envelope curves. In this study, statistics of group delay times derived from Japanese strong earthquake data were used for phase generation to fully capture the stochastic property of earthquakes. The result shows that simulated earthquake time histories can be generated according to earthquake magnitude and distances with target response spectrum.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.543-563
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• 2002

The use of the epoxy pressure injection technique to rehabilitate reinforced concrete beam-column joints damaged by strong earthquakes is investigated experimentally and analytically. Two one-half-scale exterior beam-column joint specimens were exposed to reverse cyclic loading similar to that generated from strong earthquake ground motion, resulting in damage. Both specimens were typical of new structures and incorporated full seismic details in current building codes. Thus the first specimen was designed according to Eurocode 2 and Eurocode 8 and the second specimen was designed according to ACI-318 (1995) and ACI-ASCE Committee 352 (1985). The specimens were then repaired with an epoxy pressure injection technique. The repaired specimens were subjected to the same displacement history as that imposed on the original specimens. The results indicate that the epoxy pressure injection technique was effective in restoring the strength, stiffness and energy dissipation capacity of specimens representing a modem design.

• Proceedings of the KSEEG Conference
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• 1999.04a
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• pp.116-119
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• 1999

Amplification factor spectrum, using the observed strong ground motions database in the Korean Peninsula, has been obtained and compared with Standard Response Spectrum, which was suggested by United States Nuclear Regulatory Committee. The observed und motions from the Yongwol and the Kyoungju, and the other recent Earthquakes, respectively, which ate supposed to represent domestic seismotectonic characteristics such as seismic source, attenuation of the propagation medium, and site specific effect, are used for the analysis of amplification factor spectrum. The database are slightly different from the those of the second study. Amplification factors hue been calculated by comparing the observed peak ground motions with results from responses to the observed horizontal na vertical ground motions. The comparison have shown that the amplification factors resultant from this study exceeds these of Standard Response Spectrum, The results suggest that the characteristics of seismic strong ground motion, which are supposed to represent the domestic seismotectonic characteristics, differs from those of Standard Response Spectrum, especially at higher frequencies. The results from the 2nd study are similar to those of 1st analysis.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
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• 1999.04a
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• pp.57-60
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• 1999

Amplification factor spectrum using the observed strong ground motions database in the Korean Peninsula has been obtained and compared with Standard Rpectrum which wa suggested by United States Nuclear Regulatory Committee. The observed ground motions from the Yongwol and the Kyoungju Earthquakes respectively which are supposed to represent domestic seismotectonic characteristics such as seismic source attenuation of the propagation meium and site specific effect are used for the analysis of amplification factor spectrum,. The database are slightly different from the those of the second study. Amplification factors have been calculated by comparing the observed peak ground motions with results from responses to the observed horizontal na vertical ground motions. The comparison have shown that the amplification factors resultant from this study exceeds those of Standard Response Spectrum The results suggest that the characteristics of seismic strong ground motion which are supposed to represent the domestic seismotectonic characteristics differs from those of Standard Response Spectrum especially at higher frequencies. The results from the 2nd study are similar to those of 1st analysis.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.431-453
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• 2015

A destructive earthquake, the magnitude of this earthquake was 7.2, hit Van, Turkey on October 23, 2011. After this devastating earthquake, a moderate earthquake which had 5.7 magnitude on November 9, 2011 occurred in Edremit, Van. These earthquakes caused heavy damages and collapses in many reinforced concrete buildings with loss of lives. In this paper, characteristics of ground motions of these earthquakes were studied and, deficiencies in structural elements and engineering faults such as poor workmanship and quality of construction, soft and weak stories, strong beam-weak column, short column, large overhang, hammering and unconfined gable wall were investigated. According to the observations, it was seen that, low quality of structural materials, lack of engineering services, inappropriate design and construction with insufficient detailing of the structural elements were the main reasons of heavy damages.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.76 no.3
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• pp.421-433
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• 2020

Masonry infills are normally considered as non-structural elements in design practice, therefore, the interaction between the bounding frame and the strength contribution of masonry infills is commonly ignored in the seismic analysis work of the RC frames. However, a number of typical RC frames with irregular distributed masonry infills have suffered from undesirable weak-story failure in major earthquakes, which indicates that ignoring the influence of masonry infills may cause great seismic collapse risk of RC frames. This paper presented the investigation on the risk of seismic collapse of RC frames with irregularly distributed masonry infills through a large number of nonlinear time history analyses (NTHAs). Based on the results of NTHAs, seismic fragility curves were developed for RC frames with various distribution patterns of masonry infills. It was found that the existence of masonry infills generally reduces the collapse risk of the RC frames under both frequent happened and very strong earthquakes, however, the severe irregular distribution of masonry infills, such as open ground story scenario, results in great risk of forming a weak story failure. The strong-column weak-beam (SCWB) ratio has been widely adopted in major seismic design codes to control the potential of weak story failures, where a SCWB ratio value about 1.2 is generally accepted as the lower limit. In this study, the effect of SCWB ratio on inter-story drift distribution was also parametrically investigated. It showed that improving the SCWB ratio of the RC frames with irregularly distributed masonry infills can reduce inter-story drift concentration index under earthquakes, therefore, prevent weak story failures. To achieve the same drift concentration index limit of the bare RC frame with SCWB ratio of about 1.2, which is specified in ACI318-14, the SCWB ratio of masonry-infilled RC frames should be no less than 1.5. For the open ground story scenario, this value can be as high as 1.8.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.411-442
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• 2008

Ground motions in near source region of large crustal earthquakes are significantly affected by rupture directivity and tectonic fling. These effects are the strongest at longer periods and they can have a significant impact on Engineering Structures. In this paper, it is aimed to determine near-fault ground motion effects on the nonlinear response of dams including dam-reservoir-foundation interaction. Four different types of dam, which are gravity, arch, concrete faced rockfill and clay core rockfill dams, are selected to investigate the near-fault ground motion effects on dam responses. The behavior of reservoir is taken into account by using Lagrangian approach. Strong ground motion records of Duzce (1999), Northridge (1994) and Erzincan (1992) earthquakes are selected for the analyses. Displacements, maximum and minimum principal stresses are determined by using the finite element method. The displacements and principal stresses obtained from the four different dam types subjected to these nearfault strong-ground motions are compared with each other. It is seen from the results that near-fault ground motions have different impacts on the dam types.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 2020

The vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) analysis might be cumbersome and computationally expensive in bridge engineering due to the necessity of solving large number of coupled system of equations. However, VBI analysis can provide valuable insights into the dynamic behavior of highway bridges under specific loading conditions. Hence, this paper presents a numerical study on the dynamic behavior of a conventional highway bridge under strong near-field and far-field earthquake motions considering the VBI effects. A recursive substructuring method, which enables solving bridge and vehicle equations of motion separately and suitable to be adapted to general purpose finite element softwares, was used. A thorough analysis that provides valuable information about the effect of various traffic conditions, vehicle velocity, road roughness and effect of soil conditions under far-field and near-field strong earthquake motions has been presented. A real-life concrete highway bridge was chosen for numerical demonstrations. In addition, sprung mass models of vehicles consist of conventional truck and car models were created using physical and dynamic properties adopted from literature. Various scenarios, of which the results may help to highlight the different aspects of the dynamic response of concrete highway bridges under strong earthquakes, have been considered.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.983-997
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• 2015

This research evaluates the soil conditions for seismic stations situated in Romania using the horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio (HVSR). The strong ground motion database assembled for this study consists of 179 analogue and digital strong ground motion recordings from four intermediate-depth Vrancea seismic events with $M_w{\geq}6.0$. In the first step of the analysis, the influence of the earthquake magnitude and source-to-site distance on the H/V curves is evaluated. Significant influences from both the earthquake magnitude and hypocentral distance are found especially for soil class A sites. Next, a site classification method proposed in the literature is applied for each seismic station and the soil classes are compared with those obtained from borehole data and from the topographic slope method. In addition, the success and error rates of this method are computed and compared with other studies from the literature. A more in-depth analysis of the H/V results is performed using data from seismic stations in Bucharest and a comparison of the free-field and borehole H/V curves is done for three seismic stations. The results show large differences between the free-field and the borehole curves. As a conclusion, the results from this study represent an intermediary step in the evaluation of the soil conditions for seismic stations in Romania and the need to perform more detailed soil classification analysis is highly emphasized.