• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.862-879
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• 2001

The walls of all higher plants are organized as a cellulosic, fibrillar phase embedded in a matrix phase composed of non-cellulosic polysaccharides, some proteins and, in most secondary walls, lignin. At the effective utilization of plant biomass, qualitative and quantitative analyses of plant cell walls are essential. Structural features of individual components are being clarified using newly developed equipments and techniques. However, "empirical" procedures to elucidate plant cell walls, which are not due to scientific definition of components, are still applied in some fields. These procedures may give misunderstanding for the effective utilization of plant biomass. In addition, interesting the investigation of wall organization is moving towards not only qualitatively characterisation, but also quantitation of the associations between wall components. These involve polysaccharide-polysaccharide and polysaccharide-lignin cross-links. Investigation of the associations is being done in order to understand the chemical structure, organization and biosynthesis of the cell wall and physiology of the plants. Procedures for qualitative and quantitative analyses based on the definition of cell wall components are reviewed focussing in nutritional elucidation of forage grasses by ruminant microorganisms.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.77 no.6
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• pp.819-830
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• 2021

To evaluate the performance of concrete load bearing walls in a structure under horizontal loads after being exposed to real fire, two steps were followed. In the first step, an experimental study was performed on the thermo-mechanical properties of concrete after heating to temperatures of 200-1000℃ with the purpose of determining the residual mechanical properties after cooling. The temperature was increased in line with natural fire curve in an electric furnace. The peak temperature was maintained for a period of 1.5 hour and then allowed to cool gradually in air at room temperature. All specimens were made from calcareous aggregate to be used for determining the residual properties: compressive strength, static and dynamic elasticity modulus by means of UPV test, including the mass loss. The concrete residual compressive strength and elastic modulus values were compared with those calculated from Eurocode and other analytical models from other studies, and were found to be satisfactory. In the second step, experimental analysis results were then implemented into structural numerical analysis to predict the post-fire load-bearing capacity response of the walls under vertical and horizontal loads. The parameters considered in this analysis were the effective height, the thickness of the wall, various support conditions and the residual strength of concrete. The results indicate that fire damage does not significantly affect the lateral capacity and stiffness of reinforced walls for temperature fires up to 400℃.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.141-153
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• 2023

The presented paper considers infill masonry walls' influence on the seismic reliability of precast concrete frames. The recent Bojnord earthquake on May 13th, 2017 in Iran (MW 5.4) illustrated that the infill masonry walls play a crucial role in the damage extent and life safety issues of inhabitants in the precast concrete buildings. The incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) approach was used to determine the fragility curves of the represented damaged precast frame. Then, by integrating site hazard and structural fragilities, the seismic reliability of the represented precast frame was evaluated in different damage limit states. Additionally, the static pushover analysis (SPA) approach was used to assess the seismic performance assessment of the precast frame. Bare and infilled frames were modeled as 2D frames employing the OpenSees software platform. The multi-strut macro-model method was employed for infill masonry simulation. Also, a relatively efficient and straightforward nonlinear model was used to simulate the nonlinear behavior of the precast beam-column joint. The outputs show that consideration of the masonry infilled wall effect in all spans of the structural frame leads to a decrease in the possibility of exceedance of specified damage limit states in the structures. In addition, variation of hazard curves for buildings with and without consideration of infilled walls leads to a decrease in the reliability of the building's frames with masonry infilled walls. Furthermore, the lack of infill walls in the first story significantly affects the precast concrete frame's seismic reliability and performance.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.525-545
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• 2020

This paper presents a new structural system to use as retaining walls. In civil works, there is a general trend to use traditional reinforced concrete (RC) retaining walls to resist soil pressure. Despite their good resistance, RC retaining walls have some disadvantages such as need for huge temporary formworks, high dense reinforcing, low construction speed, etc. In the present work, a composite wall with only one steel plate (steel-concrete) is proposed to address the disadvantages of the RC walls. In the proposed system, steel plate is utilized not only as tensile reinforcement but also as a permanent formwork for the concrete. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed SC composite system, an experimental program that includes nine SC composite wall specimens is developed. In this experimental study, the effects of different parameters such as distance between shear connectors, length of shear connectors, concrete ultimate strength, use of compressive steel plate and compressive steel reinforcement are investigated. In addition, a 3D finite element (FE) model for SC composite walls is proposed using the finite element program ABAQUS and load-displacement curves from FE analyses were compared against results obtained from physical testing. In all cases, the proposed FE model is reasonably accurate to predict the behavior of SC composite walls under out-of-plane loads. Results from experimental work and numerical study show that the SC composite wall system has high strength and ductile behavior under flexural loads. Furthermore, the design equations based on ACI code for calculating out-ofplate flexural and shear strength of SC composite walls are presented and compared to experimental database.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.149-154
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• 2019

The structural system of domestic high-rise apartments can be divided into two parts; the core wall system, which is composed of walls concentrated in the center and the shear wall system, which comprises a great number of walls distributed in the plan. In order to analyze the lateral behavior of each system, buildings with typical domestic high-rise apartment plans were selected and nonlinear static analysis was performed to investigate the their collapse mechanism. From the force-displacement relation derived from nonlinear static analysis, response modification factor was evaluated by calculating the overstrengh and ductility factor, which are important in the seismic response. The ductility of core wall system is small, but as it is governed by wind load, its overstrength is greatly estimated, and its response modification factor is calculated by the overstrengh factor. Due to a large number of walls, shear wall system has a large ductility, making the response modification factor considerably large.

• Computational Structural Engineering
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.19-23
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• 2023

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.263-270
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• 2017

In this study, two geometrically identical multi-storey steel buildings with different lateral load resisting systems are structurally analyzed under same earthquake conditions and they are compared with respect to their construction costs of their structural systems. One of the systems is a steel structure with eccentrically steel braced frames. The other one is a RC wall-steel frame system, that is a steel framed structure in combination with a reinforced concrete core and shear walls of minimum thickness that the national code allows. As earthquake resisting systems, steel braced frames and reinforced concrete shear walls, for both cases are located on identical places in either building. Floors of both buildings will be of reinforced concrete slabs of same thickness resting on composite beams. The façades are assumed to be covered identically with light-weight aluminum cladding with insulation. Purpose of use for both buildings is an office building of eight stories. When two systems are structurally analyzed by FEM (finite element method) and dimensionally compared, the dual one comes up with almost 34% less cost of construction with respect to their structural systems. This in turn means that, by using a dual system in earthquake zones such as Turkey, for multi-storey steel buildings with RC floors, more economical solutions can be achieved. In addition, slender steel columns and beams will add to that and consequently more space in rooms is achieved.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.101-112
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• 1999

Structural walls have been mostly used for the design of reinforced concrete buildings in seismic areas because they play a role as an efficient bracing system and offer great potential for lateral load resistance and drift control. The lateral resistance system for the earthquake load should be designed to have enough ductility and stable hysteretic response in the critical regions where plastic deformation occurred beyond yielding. The behavior of the reinforced concrete element to experience large deformation in the critical areas by a major earthquake is affected by the performance of the confined core concrete. Thus, the confinement of concrete by suitable arrangements of transverse reinforcement results in a significant increase in both the strength and ductility of compressed concrete. This paper reports the experimental results of reinforced concrete structural walls for wall-type apartment structure under axial loads and cyclic reversal of lateral loads with different confinement of the boundary elements. The results show that confinement of the boundary element by open 'U'-bar and cross tie is effective. The shear strength capacity is not increased by the confinement but deformation capacity is improve.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.111-127
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• 2013

In this paper, a new version of gravitational search algorithm based on opposition-based learning (OBGSA) is introduced and applied for optimum design of reinforced concrete retaining walls. The new algorithm employs the opposition-based learning concept to generate initial population and updating agents' position during the optimization process. This algorithm is applied to minimize three objective functions include weight, cost and $CO_2$ emissions of retaining structure subjected to geotechnical and structural requirements. The optimization problem involves five geometric variables and three variables for reinforcement setups. The performance comparison of the new OBGSA and classical GSA algorithms on a suite of five well-known benchmark functions illustrate a faster convergence speed and better search ability of OBGSA for numerical optimization. In addition, the reliability and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for optimization of retaining structures are investigated by considering two design examples of retaining walls. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm has high viability, accuracy and stability and significantly outperforms the original algorithm and some other methods in the literature.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.289-297
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• 2017

This paper presents seismic performance and reliability evaluation on steel-timber hybrid shear wall systems composed of steel moment resisting frames and infill light frame wood shear walls. Based on experimental observations, damage assessment was conducted to determine the appropriate damage-related performance objectives for the hybrid shear wall systems. Incremental time-history dynamic analyses were conducted to establish a database of seismic responses for the hybrid systems with various structural configurations. The associated reliability indices and failure probabilities were calculated by two reliability methods (i.e., fragility analysis and response surface method). Both methods yielded similar estimations of failure probabilities. This study indicated the greatly improved seismic performance of the steel-timber hybrid shear wall systems with stronger infill wood shear walls. From a probabilistic perspective, the presented results give some insights on quantifying the seismic performance of the hybrid system under different seismic hazard levels. The reliability-based approaches also serve as efficient tools to assess the performance-based seismic design methodology and calibration of relative code provisions for the proposed steel-timber hybrid shear wall systems.