• Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.203-209
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• 2010

An application of the instrumented indentation technique has been expanded from the measurements of hardness and elastic modulus to the analysis of residual stress. A slope of the indentation loading curve increases (or decreases) according to compressive (or tensile) residual stress. A theoretical equation has been established for quantifying residual stress from the slope change. However, a precise observation of the remnant indents is indispensible because the theoretical approach needs actual contact information. In addition, the conventional hardness test is still used for predicting the residual stress distribution of welded joints. Thus, we observed the three-dimensional morphologies of the remnant indents formed on artificial stress states and analyzed stress effects on morphological recovery of the indents. First, a depth recovery ratio, which has been regarded as a sensitive stress indicator, did not show a clear dependency with the residual stress. Thus an analysis on volumetric recovery was tried in this study and yielded a inverse proportional behavior with the residual stress. In addition, an elastic to plastic volume recovery ratio showed more significant correlation with the residual stress.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.60-67
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• 2021

Recently, research attention has been focused on vibration-free vehicles to transport small numbers of expensive electronic products. Vibration-free vehicles can be used to transport expensive test equipment or semiconductors, mainly produced in the domestic IT industry, and can serve as a readily available transportation system for short driving distances due to the increased efficiency on narrow national highways. This study was aimed at developing a Z-Spring to minimize the vibration by installing an air spring instead of the plate spring applied to conventional freight cars and to prevent the damage of the loaded cargo from the shock occurring during movement. The mechanical properties (elastic modulus, tensile strength, and shear strength) of carbon fiber (CF) and glass fiber (GF) prepreg were derived, and ANSYS ACP PrepPost analyses were performed. It was observed that in the case of hybrid composites, the total deformation and equivalent stress are higher than that of CFRP; however, in terms of the unit cost, the hybrid Z-Spring is more inexpensive and durable compared to the GF.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.93-105
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• 2022

With the exploitation of natural resources in China, underground resource extraction and underground space development, as well as other engineering activities are increasing, resulting in the creation of many defective rocks. In this paper, uniaxial compression tests were performed on rocks with double holes and fractures at different angles using particle flow code (PFC2D) numerical simulations and laboratory experiments. The failure behavior and mechanical properties of rock samples with holes and fractures at different angles were analyzed. The failure modes of rock with defects at different angles were identified. The fracture propagation and stress evolution characteristics of rock with fractures at different angles were determined. The results reveal that compared to intact rocks, the peak stress, elastic modulus, peak strain, initiation stress, and damage stress of fractured rocks with different fracture angles around holes are lower. As the fracture angle increases, the gap in mechanical properties between the defective rock and the intact rock gradually decreased. In the force chain diagram, the compressive stress concentration range of the combined defect of cracks and holes starts to decrease, and the model is gradually destroyed as the tensile stress range gradually increases. When the peak stress is reached, the acoustic emission energy is highest and the rock undergoes brittle damage. Through a comparative study using laboratory tests, the results of laboratory real rocks and numerical simulation experiments were verified and the macroscopic failure characteristics of the real and simulated rocks were determined to be similar. This study can help us correctly understand the mechanical properties of rocks with defects and provide theoretical guidance for practical rock engineering.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.311-320
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• 2022

TBM concrete segment requires a higher level of material properties compared to general concrete structures due to difficulties in maintenance and uncertainty in ground conditions. In this regard, recently, as one of the methods to achieve enhancement effect on concrete strength, many researchers have been focusing on adding CNTs to concrete mixture. However, even CNTs do not compensate the weakness that concrete exhibits brittle behavior after cracking. Separately, over the past few decades, a number of studies have been conducted on fiber reinforced concrete which exhibits ductile behavior due to fibers bridging cracks. However, only limited studies have been conducted to employ the advantages of the both materials together. In this study, an experimental program has been conducted to investigate the effect of CNTs on the workability and the compressive behavior of PVA-ECC which exhibits ductile tensile behavior with well-distributed cracks even without a conventional rebar. In addition to the compression test, SEM analysis has been also conducted for detailed investigation in the microstructure. The variable was the CNTs mix ratio, which were set to 0.00, 0.25, and 0.50 wt.% to the binding materials. It was observed though the test results that as the CNTs mix ratio increased, the workability considerably decreased with the reduced slump and slump flow. From the compression test results, it was also investigated that the compressive behavior was improved since the compressive strength, the strain corresponding to the compressive strength, and the modulus of elasticity increased with an increase of CNTs mix ratio. The contents of this paper will be useful for relevant research areas such as fiber reinforced concrete with CNTs which might be applied for high performance TMB concrete segments.

• Composites Research
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.412-418
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• 2022

Flame-retardant vinyl ester (VE) resin films were developed from the mixtures of brominated and non-brominated epoxy resins via esterification with methacrylic acid without reactive diluents. The films were used to fabricate carbon fiber (CF) prepregs via a hot melt impregnation process. The viscosity of VE resins suitable for film production was optimized by mixing low-viscosity bisphenol-A and high-viscosity brominated bisphenol-A epoxy precursors. Increasing the bromine content of the cured VE resin further increased the limited oxygen index (LOI) (39%), storage modulus (2.4 GPa) at 25℃ and residual carbonization (16.1%) values compared to non-brominated VE. Manual layup of as-prepared VE prepregs with subsequent curing led to the successful fabrication of CF-reinforced composites with high tensile and flexural strength. The results from the study hold high promise for a styrene-free, environmentally friendly VE composite process in the future.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.82 no.1
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• pp.93-105
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• 2022

The brittleness of concrete can be overcome by fiber reinforcement that controls the crack mechanisms of concrete. Corrosion-related durability issues can be prevented by synthetic fibers (SFs), while macro synthetic fibers have proven to be particularly effective to provide ductility and toughness after cracks. This experimental study has been performed to investigate the comparative flexural and mechanical behavior of four different macro-synthetic fiber-reinforced concretes (SFRCs). Two polyamide fibers (SF1 and SF2) with different aspect ratios and two different polypropylene fiber types (SF3 and SF4) were used in production of SFRCs. Four different SFRCs and reference concrete were compared for their influences on the toughness, compressive strength, elastic modulus, flexural strength, residual strength and splitting tensile strength. The outcomes of the study reveal that the flowability of reference mixture decreases after addition of SFs and the air voids of all SFRC mixtures increased with the addition of macro-synthetic fibers except SFRC2 mixture whose air content is the same as the reference mixture. The results also revealed that with the inclusion of SFs, 11.34% reduction in the cube compressive strength was noted for SFRC4 based on that of reference specimens and both reference concrete and SFRC exhibited nearly similar cylindrical compressive strength. Results illustrated that SFRC1 and SFRC4 mixtures consistently provide the highest and lowest flexural toughness values of 36.4 joule and 27.7 joule respectively. The toughness values of SFRC3 and SFRC4 are very near to each other.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.269-287
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• 2023

The WGJ420 fire-resistant weathering (FRW) steel is developed and manufactured with standard yield strength of 420 MPa at room temperature, which is expected to significantly enhance the performance of steel structures with excellent fire and corrosion resistances, strong seismic capacity, high strength and ductility, good resilience and robustness. In this paper, the mechanical properties of FRW steel plates and buckling behavior of columns are investigated through tests at elevated temperatures. The stress-strain curves, mechanical properties of FRW steel such as modulus of elasticity, proof strength, tensile strength, as well as corresponding reduction factors are obtained and discussed. The recommended constitutive model based on the Ramberg-Osgood relationship, as well as the relevant formulas for mechanical properties are proposed, which provide fundamental mechanical parameters and references. A total of 12 FRW steel welded I-section columns with different slenderness ratios and buckling load ratios are tested under standard fire to understand the global buckling behavior in-depth. The influences of boundary conditions on the buckling failure modes as well as the critical temperatures are also investigated. In addition, the temperature distributions at different sections/locations of the columns are obtained. It is found that the buckling deformation curve can be divided into four stages: initial expansion stage, stable stage, compression stage and failure stage. The fire test results concluded that the residual buckling capacities of FRW steel columns are substantially higher than the conventional steel columns at elevated temperatures. Furthermore, the numerical results show good agreement with the fire test results in terms of the critical temperature and maximum axial elongation. Finally, the critical temperatures between the numerical results and various code/standard curves (GB 51249, Eurocode 3, AS 4100, BS 5950 and AISC) are compared and verified both in the buckling resistance domain and in the temperature domain. It is demonstrated that the FRW steel columns have sufficient safety redundancy for fire resistance when they are designed according to current codes or standards.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.697-726
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• 2023

Brittleness as an important property of rock plays a crucial role both in the failure process of intact rock and rock mass response to excavation in engineering geological and geotechnical projects. Generally, rock brittleness indices are calculated from the mechanical properties of rocks such as uniaxial compressive strength, tensile strength and modulus of elasticity. These properties are generally determined from complicated, expensive and time-consuming tests in laboratory. For this reason, in the present research, an attempt has been made to predict the rock brittleness indices from simple, inexpensive, and quick laboratory test results namely dry unit weight, porosity, slake-durability index, P-wave velocity, Schmidt rebound hardness, and point load strength index using multiple linear regression, exponential regression, support vector machine (SVM) with various kernels, generating fuzzy inference system, and regression tree ensemble (RTE) with boosting framework. So, this could be considered as an innovation for the present research. For this purpose, the number of 39 rock samples including five igneous, twenty-six sedimentary, and eight metamorphic were collected from different regions of Iran. Mineralogical, physical and mechanical properties as well as five well known rock brittleness indices (i.e., B₁, B₂, B₃, B₄, and B₅) were measured for the selected rock samples before application of the above-mentioned machine learning techniques. The performance of the developed models was evaluated based on several statistical metrics such as mean square error, relative absolute error, root relative absolute error, determination coefficients, variance account for, mean absolute percentage error and standard deviation of the error. The comparison of the obtained results revealed that among the studied methods, SVM is the most suitable one for predicting B₁, B₂ and B₅, while RTE predicts B₃ and B₄ better than other methods.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.359-376
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• 2023

Ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) has become an attractive cast-in-place repairing material for existing engineering structures. The present study aims to investigate age-dependent high-early-strength UHPC (HESUHPC) material properties (i.e., compressive strength, elastic modulus, flexural strength, and tensile strength) as well as interfacial shear properties of HESUHPC-normal strength concrete (NSC) composites cured at different season temperatures (i.e., summer, autumn, and winter). The typical temperatures were kept for at least seven days in different seasons from weather forecasting to guarantee an approximately consistent curing and testing condition (i.e., temperature and relative humidity) for specimens at different ages. The HESUHPC material properties are tested through standardized testing methods, and the interfacial bond performance is tested through a bi-surface shear testing method. The test results quantify the positive development of HESUHPC material properties at the early age, and the increasing amplitude decreases from summer to winter. Three-day mechanical properties in winter (with the lowest curing temperature) still gain more than 60% of the 28-day mechanical properties, and the impact of season temperatures becomes small at the later age. The HESUHPC shrinkage mainly occurs at the early age, and the final shrinkage value is not significant. The HESUHPC-NSC interface exhibits sound shear performance, the interface in most specimens does not fail, and most interfacial shear strengths are higher than the NSC-NSC composite. The HESUHPC-NSC composites at the shear failure do not exhibit a large relative slip and present a significant brittleness at the failure. The typical failures are characterized by thin-layer NSC debonding near the interface, and NSC pure shear failure. Two load-slip development patterns, and two types of main crack location are identified for the HESUHPC-NSC composites tested in different ages and seasons. In addition, shear capacity of the HESUHPC-NSC composite develops rapidly at the early age, and the increasing amplitude decreases as the season temperature decreases. This study will promote the HESUHPC application in practical engineering as a cast-in-place repairing material subjected to different natural environments.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.85-93
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• 2023

Membrane separation is widely used for several applications such as water treatment, membrane reactors and climate change. Cross-linked organic-inorganic hybrid polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) / Tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) was adopted for the preparation of optimized hollow membrane (HFM) for membrane distillation or other low pressure separators for mechanical properties and permeability under varying pretreatment schemes. HFMs were prepared on semi-pilot membrane fabrication system. Novel adopted post-treatment schemes involved soaking in glycerol, magnesium sulphate (MgSO₄), sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl), and isopropanol for different durations. All fibers were characterized for morphology using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), surface roughness using atomic force microscope (AFM), elemental composition by examining Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS), water contact angle (CA°) and porosity. The performance of the fibers was evaluated for pure water permeation flux (PWF). Post-treatment with MgSO₄ gave the highest both tensile modulus and flux. Assessment of properties and performance revealed comparable results with other organic-inorganic separators, HF or flat. In spite of few reported data on post treatment using MgSO₄ in presence of TEOS, this proves the potential of low cost treatment without negative impact on other membrane properties. The flux is also comparable with hypochlorite which manifests substantial precaution requirements in actual industrial use.The relatively high values of flux/bar for sample treated with TEOS, post treated with MgSO₄ and hypochlorite are 88 and 82 LMH/bar respectively.