• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제42권1호
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• pp.121-129
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• 2012

All contemporary seismic Codes have adopted smooth design acceleration response spectra, which have derived by statistical analysis of many elastic response spectra of natural accelerograms. The above smooth design spectra are characterized by two main branches, an horizontal branch that is 2.5 times higher than the peak ground acceleration, and a declining parabolic branch. According to Eurocode EN/1998, the period range of the horizontal, flat branch is extended from 0.1 s, for rock soils, up to 0.8 s for softer ones. However, from many natural recorded accelerograms of important earthquakes, the real spectral amplification factor appears to be much higher than 2.5 and this means that the spectrum leads to an unsafe seismic design of the structures. This point is an issue open to question and it is the object of the present study. In the present paper, the spectral amplification factor of the smooth design acceleration spectra is re-calculated on the grounds of a known "reliability index" for a desired probability of exceedance. As a pilot scheme, the seismic area of Greece is chosen, as it is the most seismically hazardous area in Europe. The accelerograms of the 82 most important earthquakes, which have occurred in Greece during the last 38 years, are used. The soil categories are taken into account according to EN/1998. The results that have been concluded from these data are compared with the results obtained from other strong earthquakes reported in the World literature.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제21권3호
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• pp.373-387
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• 2018

Semi-active isolation systems based on leverage-type stiffness control strategies have been widely studied. The main concept behind this type of system is to adjust the stiffness in the isolator to match the fundamental period of the isolated system by using a simple leverage mechanism. Although this system achieves high performance under far-field earthquakes, it is unsuitable for near-fault strong ground motion. To overcome this problem, this study considers the potential energy effect in the control law of the semi-active isolation system. The minimal energy weighting (MEW) between the potential energy and kinetic energy was first optimized through a series of numerical simulations. Two MEW algorithms, namely generic and near-fault MEW control, were then developed to efficiently reduce the structural displacement responses. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, a two-degree-of-freedom structure was employed as a benchmark. Numerical results indicate that the dynamic response of the structure can be effectively dampened by the proposed MEW control under both far-field and near-fault earthquakes, whereas the structural responses resulting from conventional control methods may be greater than those for the purely passive control method. Moreover, according to experimental verifications, both the generic and near-fault MEW control modes yielded promising results under impulse-like earthquakes. The practicability of the proposed control algorithm was verified.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제73권4호
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• pp.447-454
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• 2020

Seismic isolation technology has a wide application to protect bridges from earthquake damage, a new designed bridge pier with seismic isolation are provided for railways in seismic regions of China. The pier with rocking isolation is a self-centering system under small and moderate earthquakes, and the unbonded prestressed tendons are used to prevent overturning under strong earthquakes. A numerical model based on pseudo-static testing results is presented to evaluate the seismic performance of isolation bridge piers, and is validated by the shaking table test. It is found that the rocking response and the loss of prestressing for the bridge pier increase with the increase of earthquake intensity. Besides, the intensity and spectral characteristics of input ground motion have great influence on displacement of the top and bottom of the bridge pier, while have less influence on the bending moment of the pier bottom. Experimental and numerical results show that the rocking-isolated piers presented in this study have good seismic performance, and it provides an alternative way for the railway bridge in the regions with high occurrence of earthquakes. Therefore, we provide the detailed procedures for seismic design of the rocking-isolated bridge pier, and a case study of the seismic isolation design with rocking piers is carried out to popularize the seismic isolation methods.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제10권3호
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• pp.495-521
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• 2016

Ancient monuments of Greek and Roman classical architecture usually consist of multi-drum columns that are constructed of stone blocks placed on top of each other. Several research studies deal with the seismic behaviour of such structures, since earthquakes are common causes of destruction of such monuments. This paper investigates the effect of multiple earthquakes on the seismic performance of multi-drum columns, through numerical simulations and parametric analyses. The Discrete Element Method and an appropriate contact model have been implemented in a specially developed software application that is able to efficiently perform the necessary simulations in two dimensions. Specifically, various strong ground excitations are used in series for the computation of the collective final deformation of multi-drum columns. In order to calculate this cumulative deformation for a series of ground motions, the individual deformation of the column for each excitation is computed and then used as initial conditions for the next earthquake excitation. Various multi-drum columns with different dimensions are also considered in the analyses in order to examine how the geometric characteristics of columns can affect their seismic sequence behaviour, in combination with the excitation frequency content.

• 국제초고층학회논문집
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.307-314
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• 2020

High-rise buildings with vertical setback are widely used in practice. From the field investigation of the past earthquakes, it was found that such kind of vertically irregular high-rise building structures easily suffer severe damage during strong earthquakes. This paper presents an extensive study on the earthquake responses of moment-resisting frame structures (MFS) popularly applied in high-rise buildings with vertical setback. Four groups of MFS are designed, including three groups of structures with vertical setback and one group of structures with the lateral stiffness varying along the building height but without vertical setback. The numerical models of the structures are established, and the time history analysis of the structures under different levels of earthquakes is conducted. The earthquake responses of the structures are compared. The influence of the ratio between the horizontal setback dimension and the previous plan dimension, the eccentricity of setback, and the position where the setback occurs on the seismic performance of structures is studied. The rationality of the provisions for the structures with vertical setback specified in the current design codes is checked by the findings from this study.

• 한국지진공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국지진공학회 1999년도 추계 학술발표회 논문집 Proceedings of EESK Conference-Fall
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• pp.359-366
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• 1999

This paper is a study on the seismic design and test of viscoelastic dampers in regions of moderate seismicity. First moderate seismic waves are generated with measured strong seismic data based on the theory of effective peak acceleration. Then their response spectrums are compared each other to estimate the required damping to attenuate the vibration. As relatively smaller damping is required in the regions of moderate seismicity than in the regions of strong seismicity proper viscoelastic dampers can be designed according to the estimated damping. Finally a test building model is designed and the viscoelastic dampers are installed for the experimental study under moderate and strong earthquakes, It is found that viscoelastic dampers with low damping capacity developed in this study are enough to reduce the building response in regions of moderate seismicity.

• 전자통신동향분석
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• 제33권3호
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• pp.51-58
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• 2018

Natural and social disasters, such as typhoons, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, fires, explosions, and traffic accidents occur frequently around the world. In Korea, a vicious cycle of large-scale accidents caused by natural disasters and insensitivity to safety is repeated each year. In particular, the tragic sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014 and strong earthquakes with a magnitude of 5.0 and greater in Gyeongju and Pohang in 2016 and 2017, respectively, threw the entire country into a state of shock, increasing the public anxiety regarding disaster preparedness. This paper discusses the trends in broadcast emergency alert systems used to minimize damage from a disaster by delivering urgent status information quickly and accurately through a broadcast network, and to provide information regarding disaster risk and emergency evacuation procedures.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제12권5호
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• pp.559-567
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• 2017

Slender structures like reinforced concrete (RC) chimneys are severely damaged or collapsed during severe wind storms or strong ground motions all over the world. Today, with the improvement in technology and industry, most factories need these slender structures with increasing height and decreasing in shell thickness causing vulnerable to winds and earthquakes. Main objectives in this study are to make structural wind and earthquake analysis of RC chimneys by using a well-known international standard CICIND 2001 and real recorded time history accelerations and to clarify weak points of these tall and slender structures against these severe natural actions. Findings of this study show that maximum tensile stress and shear stress approximately increase 103.90% and 312.77% over or near the openings on the body of the RC chimneys that cause brittle failure around this region of openings.

• 한국전산구조공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국전산구조공학회 2003년도 봄 학술발표회 논문집
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• pp.211-218
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• 2003

Most structures are expected to deform beyond the limit of linearly elastic behavior when subjected to strong ground motion. Seismic evaluation of structure requires an estimation of the structural performance in terms of displacement demand imposed by earthquakes on the structure. Nonlinear response history analysis(NRHA) is the most rigorous procedure to compute seismic performance among various inelastic analysis methods. But nonlinear analysis procedures necessitate more practical and reliable tools for predicting seismic behavior of structures. This paper presents a nonlinear direct spectrum method(NDSM) to evaluate seismic performance of structures, without iterative computations, given by the structural initial elastic period and yield strength from the pushover analysis, especially for MDF(multi degree of freedom) system. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the accuracy and reliability of this method from a point of view of various earthquakes and structure parameters.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제11권6호
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• pp.967-982
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• 2016

Current codes design the buildings based on life safety criteria. In a performance-based design (PBD) approach, decisions are made based on demands, such as target displacement and performance of structure in use. This type of design prevents loss of life but does not limit damages or maintain functionality. As a newly developed method, resilience-based design (RBD) aims to maintain functionality of buildings and provide liveable conditions after strong ground movement. In this paper, the seismic performance of plain and strengthened RC frames (an eight-story and two low-rise) is evaluated. In order to evaluate earthquake performance of the frames, the performance points of the frames are calculated by the capacity spectrum method (CSM) of ATC-40. This method estimates earthquake-induced deformation of an inelastic system using a reduced response spectrum. Finally, the seismic performances of the frames are evaluated and the results are compared with a resilience-based design criterion.