The setting and hardening process of concrete can be considered as the most critical time period during the life of a concrete structure. To assure high quality and avoid problems in performance throughout the life of the material, it is essential to have reliable information about the early age properties of the concrete. This paper presents a new method to monitor the hydration process of cementitious materials at early ages. The technique is based on the measurement of the reflection coefficient (or reflection loss) of high frequency shear waves at an interface between a steel plate and e.g. concrete. Several experimental studies that examine the ability of the wave reflection method to qualitatively and quantitatively describe the setting and hardening process of cement paste, mortar and concrete are presented. The results show that parameters such as setting time, compressive strength, elastic and visco-elastic moduli and degree of hydration of cementitious materials can reliably monitored with the wave reflection method. The relationship between the measured reflection loss and the compressive strength was successfully used in a first field trial of the method to determine the inplace strength of precast concrete elements.

Repaired RC flexural members with ductile cementitious composite are numerically simulated to understand the improved performance in post-peak behavior. Also, stress distributions along steel reinforcements and crack width on the tensile surface are monitored to understand the effect of using ductile cementitious composite as a repair material. The results provide durability characteristics of repaired structures under flexural loading condition.

The seismic performance of a three-story knee-braced moment-resisting frame (KBMRF), which was typically employed to support pipelines for oil or gas, was investigated. Nonlinear static pushover analyses were performed first to observe the force-displacement relationship under increasing seismic load. Then nonlinear dynamic time-history analyses were carried out usingeight earthquake ground motion time-histories scaled to fit the design spectrum of UBC-97. It turned out that the maximum inter-story drift was smaller than the drift limit of 1.5 % of the structure height, and that the columns remained elastic. Based on these analytical results, it can be concluded that the seismic performance of the structure satisfies all the requirements regulated in the seismic code.

점탄성감쇠기 (VED)를 건물의 내부에 가새의 형태로 설치하는 기존의 방법은 공간 이용에 제약이 되며, 내부 동션을 방해할 수 있다. 이러한 단점은 VED를 건물 사이에 설치함으로써 해결할 수 있다. 본 연구에서는 신축이음부에 설치된 VED의 내진성능 향상 효과에 관하여 연구하였다. 이를 위하여 VED로 연결된 3자유도 구조물의 지진하중에 대한 각 설계 변수들의 효과를 파악하고, 제안된 방법의 실용성을 검토하였다. 이를 바탕으로 서로 다른 구조시스템으로 설계된 5층 구조물을 VED로 연결하고 시간이력 해석을 수행하였다. 해석 결과에 따르변 인접한 구조물의 고유주기가 다르게 설계된 경우, VED로 연결된 구조물의 내진 성능을 상당히 향상할 수 있는 것으로 나타났다.

This paper presents equivalent linear system for 76-story benchmark building with nonlinear tuned liquid column damper (TLCD). The response characteristic of benchmark building for the deterministic wind loads is investigated. And then, the equivalent linear system is obtained first in terms of equivalent linear damping and second in terms of equivalent single degree of freedom system. Numerical results show that these equivalent linear systems can almost exactly predict the controlled structural responses when compared with the nonlinear TLCD system. Finally, an equation for estimating the peak response of structure subjected to harmonic load is derived. This equation does not require any iteration process which is essential in the analysis using equivalent linear system for TLCD.

In this paper, the stiffness and damping matrices are experimentally constructed using the structural modal information on frequencies, damping ratio and modal vectors, which are obtained by shaking table tests. Free vibration, harmonic and white noise vibration tests are performed. The acceleration of the shaking table was used as the input signal, and the resulting accelerations of each floor were measured as output signals. The characteristics and limitations of modal information from the each test are compared. The results of this study would be a basic resource of the analytical and experimental studies on the system identification of structures

In this paper, the preliminary design procedure of magnetorheological (MR) dampers is developed for controlling the building response induced by seismic excitation. The dynamic characteristics and control effects of the modeling methods of MR dampers such as Bingham, biviscous, hysteretic biviscous, simple Bouc-Wen, Bouc-Wen with mass element, and phenomenological models are investigated. Of these models, hysteretic biviscous model which is simple and describes the hysteretic characteristics, is used for numerical studies. The capacity of MR damper is determined as a portion of not the building weight but the lateral restoring force. A method is proposed for optimal placement and number of MR dampers, and its effectiveness is verified by comparing it with the simplified sequential search algorithm. Numerical results indicate that the capacity, number and the placement can be reasonably determined using the proposed design procedure

Earthquake resistant design was introduced to Korea in 1988 for tall buildings, in 1992 for highway bridges and even earlier than that for nuclear power plants. The apartments designed by large unit housing planning was constructed by tunnel form method for the construction convenient in 1980. As a results, many structures without any seismic resistance capacity were built during the 80’s. In this paper, to improve the seismic capacity in wall-slab joint, experiments which improve and retrofit a seismic capacity by steel reinforcing, unequal angle bracing, carbon sheet attachment are carried out. These methods also are economic and simple in mitigating seismic hazard, improving earthquake-resistance performance, and reducing the risk level of building occupants. Consequently these methods were confirmed its effectiveness in improving the seismic performance were confirmed its effectiveness.

Before incorporating the earthquake-resistance design in design code(1998), most of existing residential buildings were built without having lateral resistance capacity in addition to their structural peculiarity such as exterior stair ways, exterior elevator room. For these reasons, the retrofitting research demands for existing buildings arise recently and many retrofitting methods are proposed. These tasks are important to reduce the enormous economic loss and environmental issues. In this study, Scaled residential buildings with/without lateral resistance were tested and monitored with external lateral load especially toward the longer side of the building. From these experiments, enhanced retrofitting methods of old shear wall system are proposed and also compared with structural analysis.