For the practical application of U-flanged Truss Hybrid beams, the flexural capacity of hybrid beams with end reinforcement details using vertical steel plates was verified. The bending test of U-flanged Truss Hybrid beams was performed using the same top chord under the compressive force, but with the thickness of the bottom plate and the amount of tensile reinforcement. The initial stiffness and maximum load of the specimen with tensile reinforcement have a higher value than that of the specimen without tension reinforcement, but the more tensile reinforcement, the greater the load decrease after the maximum load. In the case of the specimen with tensile reinforcement, because the test result value is 76% to 88% when compared with the flexural strength according to Korea Design Code, the safety of the U-flanged Truss Hybrid beam with the same details of the specimens can’t ensure. Therefore, the development of new details is required to ensure that the bottom steel plate and the tensile reinforcement can undergo sufficient tensile deformation.
A smart tuned mass damper (TMD) is widely studied for seismic response reduction of various structures. Control algorithm is the most important factor for control performance of a smart TMD. This study used a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) among reinforcement learning techniques to develop a control algorithm for a smart TMD. A magnetorheological (MR) damper was used to make the smart TMD. A single mass model with the smart TMD was employed to make a reinforcement learning environment. Time history analysis simulations of the example structure subject to artificial seismic load were performed in the reinforcement learning process. Critic of policy network and actor of value network for DDPG agent were constructed. The action of DDPG agent was selected as the command voltage sent to the MR damper. Reward for the DDPG action was calculated by using displacement and velocity responses of the main mass. Groundhook control algorithm was used as a comparative control algorithm. After 10,000 episode training of the DDPG agent model with proper hyper-parameters, the semi-active control algorithm for control of seismic responses of the example structure with the smart TMD was developed. The simulation results presented that the developed DDPG model can provide effective control algorithms for smart TMD for reduction of seismic responses.
The damage to non-structural elements in buildings has been increasing due to earthquakes. In Korea, post-installed anchors produced overseas have been mainly used for seismic anchorage of non-structural components to structures. Recently, a new cast-in-place concrete insert anchor installed in concrete without drilling has been developed in Korea. In this paper, an experimental study was conducted to evaluate the tensile and shear strengths of the newly developed anchor under monotonic load. The failure modes of the tension specimens were divided into concrete breakout failure and steel failure, and all shear specimens showed steel failure. In both tension and shear, the maximum loads of specimens were greater than the nominal strengths predicted by the concrete design code (KDS 14 20 54). As a result, it is expected that the current code can also be used to calculate the strength of the developed cast-in anchor.
This study develops finite element models for seismically-deficient reinforced concrete building frame retrofitted using fiber-reinforced polymer jacketing system and validates the finite element models with full-scale dynamic test for as-built and retrofitted conditions. The bond-slip effects measured from a past experimental study were modeled using one-dimensional slide line model, and the bond-slip models were implemented to the finite element models. The finite element model can predict story displacement and inter-story drift ratio with slight simulation variation compared to the measured responses from the full-scale dynamic tests.
This paper aims to develop numerical models for seismically-deficient reinforced concrete columns retrofitted using a fiber-reinforced polymer jacketing system under blast loading scenarios. To accomplish the research goal, a coupling model reproducing blast loads was developed and implemented to the column model. The column model was validated with a past experimental study, and the blast responses were compared to the numerical responses produced by past researchers. The validated modeling method was implemented to the non-retrofitted and retrofitted column models to estimate the effectiveness of the retrofit system. Based on the numerical responses, the retrofit system can significantly reduce the peak dynamic responses under a given blast loading scenario.
In this paper, nonlinear finite element analysis was conducted based on the experimental results on buckling restrained brace. The reliability of the analytical model was verified by comparing the results of experimental studies with hysteresis loop, bi-linear curve, cumulative energy dissipation capacity, and equivalent viscous damping. A valid finite element model has been secured and will be used as basic data for finite element analysis of buckling restrained braces in the future.
This paper describes an adaptive hybrid evolutionary firefly algorithm for a topology optimization of truss structures. The truss topology optimization problems begins with a ground structure which is composed of all possible nodes and members. The optimization process aims to find the optimum layout of the truss members. The hybrid metaheuristics are then used to minimize the objective functions subjected to static or dynamic constraints. Several numerical examples are examined for the validity of the present method. The performance results are compared with those of other metaheuristic algorithms.
This study presents the estimation of crack depth by analyzing temperatures extracted from thermal images and environmental parameters such as air temperature, air humidity, illumination. The statistics of all acquired features and the correlation coefficient among thermal images and environmental parameters are presented. The concrete crack depths were predicted by four different machine learning models: Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting (GB), and AdaBoost (AB). The machine learning algorithms are validated by the coefficient of determination, accuracy, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The AB model had a great performance among the four models due to the non-linearity of features and weak learner aggregation with weights on misclassified data. The maximum depth 11 of the base estimator in the AB model is efficient with high performance with 97.6% of accuracy and 0.07% of MAPE. Feature importances, permutation importance, and partial dependence are analyzed in the AB model. The results show that the marginal effect of air humidity, crack depth, and crack temperature in order is higher than that of the others.