Timber structures are susceptible to moisture, contamination, and pest infestation, which can compromise their integrity and pose a significant fire hazard. Despite these drawbacks, timber's lightweight properties, eco-friendliness, and alignment with current architectural trends emphasizing sustainability make it an attractive option for construction. Moreover, timber structures offer economic benefits and provide a natural aesthetic that regulates building temperature and humidity. In recent years, timber domes have gained popularity due to their high recyclability, lightness, and improved fire resistance. Researchers are exploring hybrid timber and steel domes to enhance stability and rigidity. However, shallow dome structures still face challenges related to structural instability. This study investigates stability problems associated with timber domes, the behavior of timber and steel hybrid domes, and the impact of timber member positioning on dome stability and critical load levels. The paper analyzes unstable buckling in single-layer lattice domes using an incremental analysis method. The critical buckling load of the domes is examined based on the arrangement of timber members in the inclined and horizontal directions. The analysis shows that nodal snapping is observed in the case of a concentrated load, whereas snap-back is also observed in the case of a uniform load. Furthermore, the use of inclined timber and horizontal steel members in the lattice dome design provides adequate stability.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely applied to various engineering fields. Especially, RL has shown successful performance for control problems, such as vehicles, robotics, and active structural control system. However, little research on application of RL to optimal structural design has conducted to date. In this study, the possibility of application of RL to structural design of reinforced concrete (RC) beam was investigated. The example of RC beam structural design problem introduced in previous study was used for comparative study. Deep q-network (DQN) is a famous RL algorithm presenting good performance in the discrete action space and thus it was used in this study. The action of DQN agent is required to represent design variables of RC beam. However, the number of design variables of RC beam is too many to represent by the action of conventional DQN. To solve this problem, multi-agent DQN was used in this study. For more effective reinforcement learning process, DDQN (Double Q-Learning) that is an advanced version of a conventional DQN was employed. The multi-agent of DDQN was trained for optimal structural design of RC beam to satisfy American Concrete Institute (318) without any hand-labeled dataset. Five agents of DDQN provides actions for beam with, beam depth, main rebar size, number of main rebar, and shear stirrup size, respectively. Five agents of DDQN were trained for 10,000 episodes and the performance of the multi-agent of DDQN was evaluated with 100 test design cases. This study shows that the multi-agent DDQN algorithm can provide successfully structural design results of RC beam.
In the case of a school building, even though it is a regular structure in terms of plan shape, if the masonry infill wall acts as a lateral load resisting element, it can be determined as a torsionally irregular building. As a result, the strength and ductility of the structure are reduced, which may cause additional earthquake damage to the structure. Therefore, in this study, a structure similar to a school building with torsional irregularity was selected as an example structure and the damping performance of the PC-BRB was analyzed by adjusting the eccentricity according to the amount of masonry infilled wall. As a result of nonlinear dynamic analysis after seismic reinforcement, the torsional irregularity of each floor was reduced compared to before reinforcement, and the beams and column members of the collapse level satisfied the performance level due to the reduction of shear force and the reinforcement of stiffness. The energy dissipation of PC-BRB was similar in the REC-10 ~ REC-20 analytical models with an eccentricity of 20% or less. REC-25 with an eccentricity of 25% was the largest, and it is judged that it is effective to combine and apply PC-BRB when it has an eccentricity of 25% or more to control the torsional behavior.
Modular construction is an economical and efficient construction that reduces time and costs by manufacturing units in factories and constructing them on site. Currently, the demand for modular construction is increasing not only abroad but also domestically. As the demand for modular construction increases, a lot of development and research on connections between modular units are being conducted. Connections between modular units should be quick and simple to assemble when assembling units on site, and should be in a form that allows each unit to be connected regardless of direction. In addition, it must be able to exert sufficient strength against external loads. In this study, a connection between modular units using connecting steel plates and bolts was proposed, and the nonlinear behavior of the connection to external lateral force was analyzed through finite element analysis, and resistance performance was evaluated.
Recently, a novel cast-in specialty insert was developed in Korea as an anchor for lightweight pipe supports, including fire-protection pipes. As these pipe supports and anchors play a critical role in transferring loads of fire-protection pipes to structural members, it is crucial to evaluate their seismic performance before applying the newly developed insert. In this study, the seismic shear performance of the insert anchors was evaluated through cyclic loading tests based on the loading protocols of ACI 355.2 and FEMA 461. Initially, five monotonic loading tests were conducted on the insert anchors in cracked concrete, followed by cyclic loading tests based on the monotonic test results. The findings revealed that the insert anchors exhibited negligible decrease in shear strength even after cyclic loading. Furthermore, a comparison of the maximum load and displacement of the insert anchors obtained under the loading protocols of ACI 355.2 and FEMA 461 was performed to investigate the applicability of the FEMA 461 loading protocol for anchor performance evaluation.
A two-hour fire-resistance PC hollow slab for residential use was developed to secure structural and fire-resistance performance and to be applied to the general building and apartment housing markets. Compared to the existing hollow slab, in order to secure the same or better structural performance and economic feasibility by reducing the quantity, it was attempted to secure the fire resistance performance by reducing the concrete filling rate in the cross section and adjusting the thickness of the upper and lower flanges by optimizing the hollow shape in the cross section of the slab. For structural performance evaluation, experiments were performed on PC hollow slabs by varying the member thickness and the presence or absence of overlaid concrete, and all of the experimental results showed that the design strength was sufficiently exhibited and that stability during construction was possible. The developed synthetic PC hollow slab has secured fire resistance and residential performance so that it can be applied to all buildings, and it is intended to be immediately applied to the field.
This paper investigates the effects of aspect ratio and volume fraction of hooked-end normal-strength steel fibers on the compressive and flexural properties of high-strength concrete with specified compressive strength of 60 MPa. Three types of hooked-end steel fibers with aspect ratios of 64, 67 and 80 were considered and three volume fractions of 0.25%, 0.50% and 0.75% for each steel fiber were respectively added into each high-strength concrete mixture. The test results indicated that the addition of normal-strength steel fibers is effective to improve compressive and flexural properties of high-strength concrete but fiber aspect ratio had little effect on the modulus of elasticity and compressive strength. As steel fiber content and aspect ratio increased, flexural beahvior of notched high-strength concrete beams was effectively improved.
Existing reinforced concrete (RC) frame buildings have seismic vulnerabilities because of seismically deficient details. In particular, since cumulative damage caused by successive earthquakes causes serious damage, repair/retrofit rehabilitation studies for successive earthquakes are needed. This study investigates the repair effect of fiber-reinforced polymer jacketing system for the seismically-vulnerable building structures under successive earthquakes. The repair modeling method developed and validated from the previous study was implemented to the building models. Additionally, the main parameters of the FRP jacketing system were selected as the number of FRP layers associated with the confinement effects and the installation location. To define the repair effects of the FRP jacketing system with the main parameters, this study conducted nonlinear time-history analyses for the building structural models with the various repairing scenarios. Based on this investigation, the repair effects of the damaged building structures were significantly affected by the damage levels induced from the mainshocks regardless of the retrofit scenarios.