• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.153-160
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• 2016

Purpose: This study was conducted to experimentally investigate the structural safety of and identify critical locations in a front-end loader under impact loads. Methods: Impact and static tests were conducted on a commonly used front-end loader mounted on a tractor. In the impact test, the bucket of the front-end loader with maximum live load was raised to its maximum lift height and was allowed to free fall to a height of 500 mm above the ground where it was stopped abruptly. For the static test, the bucket with maximum live load was raised and held at the maximum lift height, median height, and a height of 500 mm from the ground. Strain gages were attached at twenty-three main locations on the front-end loader, and the maximum stresses and strains were measured during respective impact and static tests. Results: Stresses and strains at the same location on the loader were higher in the impact test than in the static test, for most of measurement locations. This indicated that the front-end loader was put under a severe environment during impact loading. The safety factors for stresses were higher than 1.0 at all locations during impact and static tests. Conclusions: Since the lowest safety factor was higher than 1.0, the front-end loader was considered as structurally safe under impact loads. However, caution must be exercised at the locations having relatively low safety factors because failure may occur at these locations under high impact loads. These important design locations were identified to be the bucket link elements and the connection elements between the tractor frame and front-end loader. A robust design is required for these elements because of their high failure probability caused by excessive impact stress.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.541-546
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• 1991

The Ionescu-Shiley bovine pericardial xenograft valve was the most common cardiac substitute valve at Seoul National University Hospital. Since the follow-up extended for longer than 10 years, a total of and consecutive 107 patients with double mitral and aortic valve replacement using this valve from May 1979 to June 1984 were studied for the long-term clinical results. Their ages were 34.0$\pm$11.9 years at surgery, and eight patients died within 30 days of surgery with operative mortality rate of 7.5%. Ninety-nine early survivors were followed up for a total of 488.1 patient-years[Mean$\pm$SD, 4.9$\pm$2.7 years], and nine died with the linearlized late mortality rate of 1.84% /patient-year[pt-yr]. They experienced major complications: thromboembolism, 0.615% /pt-yr bleeding, 0.205% /pt-yr; endocarditis, l. 639%/pt-yr; overall valve failure, 6.146% /pt-yr; and primary tissue failure, 1.639%/ pt-yr. The actuarial survival rates were 91.4$\pm$2.9% and 89.6$\pm$3.4% at postoperative 5 and 10 years, and the probability of freedom from thromboembolism was 95.8$\pm$2.5% at 10 years. The primary tissue failure began to occur from postoperative 6 years and the probabilities of freedom from structural valve failure were 80.2$\pm$7.9% and 62.3$\pm$12.7% at 8 and 10 years after surgery respectively. Although there was increasing number of patients with valve tissue failure after 6 years, the evidence of expected premature and accelerated valve degeneration among young population was not clear on the age-related analysis. And, no definite cumulative patient groups beyond the various age limits could be suggested for or against the use of this valve.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.237-262
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• 2015

In this study, we try to compare different intensity measures for evaluating nonlinear response of bridge structure. This paper presents seismic analytic fragility of a three-span concrete girder highway bridge. A complete detail of bridge modeling parameters and also its verification has been presented. Fragility function considers the relationship of intensities of the ground motion and probability of exceeding certain state of damage. Incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) has been subjected to the bridge from medium to strong ground motions. A suite of 20 earthquake ground motions with different range of PGAs are used in nonlinear dynamic analysis of the bridge. Complete sensitive analyses have been done on the response of bridge and also efficiency and practically of them are studied to obtain a proficient intensity measure for these types of structure by considering its sensitivity to the period of the bridge. Three dimensional finite element (FE) model of the bridge is developed and analyzed. The numerical results show that the bridge response is very sensitive to the earthquake ground motions when PGA and Sa (Ti, 5%) are used as intensity measure (IM) and also indicated that the failure probability of the bridge system is dominated by the bridge piers.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.700-703
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• 2004

A reliability analysis and design procedure based on the design of experiment (DOE) is combined with the response surface method (RSM) for numerical efficiency. The procedure established is based on a 3$^n$ full factorial DOE for numerical quadrature using explicit formula of optimum levels and weights derived for general distributions. The full factorial moment method (FFMM) shows good performance in terms of accuracy and ability to treat non-normally distributed random variables. But, the FFMM becomes very inefficient because the number of function evaluation required increases exponentially as the number of random variables considered increases. To enhance the efficiency, the response surface moment method (RSMM) is proposed. In RSMM, experiments only with high probability are conducted and the rest of data are complemented by a quadratic response surface approximation without mixed terms. The response surface is updated by conducting experiments one by one until the value of failure probability is converged. It is calculated using the Pearson system and the four statistical moments obtained from the experimental data. A measure for checking the relative importance of an experimental point is proposed and named as influence index. During the update of response surface, mixed terms can be added into the formulation.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.49-58
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• 2022

The 2017 Pohang earthquake caused severe damage to low-rise piloti buildings. The damage was caused mainly by column shear failure, and some core walls were as well. The damaged piloti buildings in Pohang City could be relieved if they were designed correctly according to the standards at that time. However, the post-earthquake investigation revealed design, construction, and permission problems. To solve the problems, the Piloti Building Structure Design Guidelines that include strict specifications were published in 2018. Separately, KDS 41 17 00, the seismic design standard for buildings, was enacted in 2019 and it included the guideline contents. Therefore, at least after the publication of the guidelines, piloti buildings, designed by the standard and guidelines, can be expected to possess better seismic performance than existing piloti buildings. To confirm this, the probability of exceedance for several damage state thresholds was estimated for existing and designed piloti buildings. As a result, the probability of damage of designed piloti buildings was very low compared to existing ones. Consequently, it was confirmed that the guideline and standard adequately supplement the structural fragility of existing piloti buildings.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.49-57
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• 2020

In comparison with the existing static reliability analysis methods, the dynamic reliability analysis(DyRA) method is more suitable for estimating the failure probability of a structure subjected to earthquake excitations because it can take into account the frequency characteristics and damping capacity of the structure. However, the DyRA is known to have an issue of numerical stability due to the uncertainty in random sampling of the earthquake excitations. In order to solve this numerical stability issue in the DyRA approach, this study proposed two earthquake-scale factors. The first factor is defined as the ratio of the first earthquake excitation over the maximum value of the remaining excitations, and the second factor is defined as the condition number of the matrix consisting of the earthquake excitations. Then, we have performed parametric studies of two factors on numerical stability of the DyRA method. In illustrative example, it was clearly confirmed that the two factors can be used to verify the numerical stability of the proposed DyRA method. However, there exists a difference between the two factors. The first factor showed some overlapping region between the stable results and the unstable results so that it requires some additional reliability analysis to guarantee the stability of the DyRA method. On the contrary, the second factor clearly distinguished the stable and unstable results of the DyRA method without any overlapping region. Therefore, the second factor can be said to be better than the first factor as the criterion to determine whether or not the proposed DyRA method guarantees its numerical stability. In addition, the accuracy of the numerical analysis results of the proposed DyRA has been verified in comparison with those of the existing first-order reliability method(FORM), Monte Carlo simulation(MCS) method and subset simulation method(SSM). The comparative results confirmed that the proposed DyRA method can provide accurate and reliable estimation of the structural failure probability while maintaining the superior numerical efficiency over the existing methods.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.569-584
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• 2016

This paper presents a method for stochastic modelling of fatigue crack growth and optimising inspection and maintenance strategy for the structural members of steel bridges. The fatigue crack evolution is considered as a stochastic process with uncertainties, and the Gamma process is adopted to simulate the propagation of fatigue crack in steel bridge members. From the stochastic modelling for fatigue crack growth, the probability of failure caused by fatigue is predicted over the service life of steel bridge members. The remaining fatigue life of steel bridge members is determined by comparing the fatigue crack length with its predetermined threshold. Furthermore, the probability of detection is adopted to consider the uncertainties in detecting fatigue crack by using existing damage detection techniques. A multi-objective optimisation problem is proposed and solved by a genetic algorithm to determine the optimised inspection and maintenance strategy for the fatigue affected steel bridge members. The optimised strategy is achieved by minimizing the life-cycle cost, including the inspection, maintenance and failure costs, and maximizing the service life after necessary intervention. The number of intervention during the service life is also taken into account to investigate the relationship between the service life and the cost for maintenance. The results from numerical examples show that the proposed method can provide a useful approach for cost-effective inspection and maintenance strategy for fatigue affected steel bridges.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.1130-1135
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• 2003

The need to increase the reliability of a structural system has been significantly brought in the procedure of real designs to consider, for instance, the material properties or geometric dimensions that reveal a random or incompletely known nature. Reliability based design optimization of a real system now becomes an emerging technique to achieve reliability, robustness and safety of these problems. Finite element analysis program and the reliability analysis program are necessary to evaluate the responses and the probabilities of failure of the system, respectively. Moreover, integration of these programs is required during the procedure of reliability based design optimization. It is well known that reliability based design optimization can often have so many local minima that it cannot converge to the specified probability of failure. To overcome this problem, barrier function method in reliability based design optimization is suggested. To illustrate the proposed formulation, reliability based design optimization of a bracket is performed. AMV and FORM are employed for reliability analysis and their optimization results are compared based on the accuracy and efficiency.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.18 no.10
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• pp.154-160
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• 2001

For major structural components periodic inspections and integrity assessments are needed for the safety. However, many flaws are undetectable because sampling inspection is carried out during in-service inspection. Probabilistic integrity assessment is applied to take into consideration of uncertainty and variance of input parameters arise due to material properties and undetectable cracks. This paper describes a Probabilistic Fracture Mechanics(PFM) analysis based on the Monte Carlo(MC) algorithms. Taking a number of sampling data of probabilistic variables such as fracture toughness value, crack depth and aspect ratio of an initial surface crack, a MC simulation of failure judgement of samples is performed. for the verification of this analysis, a comparison study of the PFM analysis using a commercial code, mathematical method is carried out and a good agreement was observed between those results.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.96-100
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is presented a rational method of predicting dynamic/impact tensile strength of high tensile steel materials widely used fur structural material of automobiles. It is known that the ultimate strength is related with the loading speed and the Lethargy Coefficient from the tensile test. The Dynamic Lethargy Coefficient is proportional to the disorientation of the molecular structure and indicates the magnitude of defects resulting from the probability of breaking the bonds responsible for its strength. The coefficient is obtained from the simple tensile test such as failure time and stresses at fracture. These factors not only affect the static strength but also have a great influence on the dynamic/impact characteristics of the joist and the adjacent structures. This strength is used to analyze the failure life prediction of mechanical system by virtue of its material fracture. The impact tensile test is performed to evaluate the life parameters due to loading speed with the proposed method. Also the evaluation of the dynamic/impact effect on the material tensile strength characteristics is compared with the result of Campbell-Cooper equation to verify the proposed method.