Sharif Digital Repository

Research on the characteristics of the near field earthquakes has been very popular in recent years due to the considerable damages they have caused to the structures located within the vicinity of seismic sources. The incapability of response spectra for structural damage assessment has been revealed through recent investigations. The recorded data show that the near field earthquakes are often accompanied by a large energy pulse in the beginning of the records caused by the so-called directivity phenomenon. That has encouraged many researchers to study the possibility of using the velocity pulse of these records to evaluate the imposed seismic demands on structures. Thus, investigating the... 

In this thesis, supervised and unsupervised deep learning-based frameworks were proposed for distributed damage detection and quantification in concrete using sinusoidal ultrasonic response signals. Before the main study on ultrasonic-based concrete damage assessment, a preliminary study was performed on deep learning-based concrete compressive strength prediction. In this study, convolutional neural networks were utilized to predict the compressive strength of concrete through its mix proportions. The Genetic algorithm was employed to find the optimum number of filters in each convolutional layer of the convolutional neural networks. The proposed framework demonstrated high accuracy in... 

The main objective of this research is to use the visual features of damage in evaluating the post-earthquake status of the damaged structures. Structural health monitoring, as a comprehensive approach, includes methods for identifying the damaged structures, estimating damage location, measuring damage extent, and methods for reconstructing and repairing structures. The present study is specifically focused on the second and third stages of structural health monitoring, including “estimating the location of damage” and “measuring the extent of damage”. Various methods for evaluating the condition of earthquake-damaged structures are available in technical literature; one of the most common... 

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the extent of damage of rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls after an earthquake using surface crack patterns. One of the most important tasks after an earthquake is to assess the safety and classify the performance level of buildings. This assessment is usually performed by visual inspection that is prone to significant errors. In this research, an extensive database on the images of damaged rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls is collected from the literature. This database includes more than 200 images from experimental quasi-static cyclic tests. Using the concept of Fractal geometry, several probabilistic models are developed by... 

The considerable structural damage caused by near field earthquakes has revealed the need for further research on their characteristics and their corresponding effects on structures. The short-duration, high- energy pulses present in these types of earthquakes impose high demands on the structures compared to far field ground motions. Thus, more research is needed to improve the current design methods, especially from a performance based point of view for the structures close to faults. This study is about damage assessment of steel moment resisting frame structures under near-field ground motions from a performance based design point of view. A number of 3 and 9-story, 3-D structural model... 

The design and operation of energy systems infrastructure is typically based on key reliability criteria such as system security and adequacy. Nowaday, with the rise of unexpected events and events such as floods, earthquakes, storms, and other natural phenomena can affect the performance of energy infrastructure. Given the low probability of these events, reliability studies and relevant criteria cannot guarantee that an energy infrastructure can respond well to these events. Investigating the ability of energy infrastructures to deal with these phenomena is divided into resilience studies. To overcome these challenges, this thesis has attempted to detail some of these natural events.... 

In recent decades, large economic losses and social impacts following earthquakes and hurricanes have revealed the need for improved design criteria intended to reduce consequences including economic impacts to an acceptable level along with life protection. So, it is tried to express the expected performance of structures as financial and social criteria. Any assessment on earthquake consequences requires estimations of structural responses to seismic excitations. Endurance Time (ET) method as a dynamic procedure requiring reasonably reduced computational effort compared to other common time-history based procedures, is used to estimate the response of the structure in all levels of hazard... 

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the stiffness and strength of damaged rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls after an earthquake using surface crack patterns. Assessing the damage severity of buildings after an earthquake is an important part of the emergency inspection operation of buildings. Expert inspectors tag buildings into two categories of safe or unsafe that are usually affected by subjective decisions, which may result in catastrophic events reported in previous earthquakes. In this research, an extensive database on the images of damaged rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls (RCSWs) is collected and used to develop predictive equations for updated stiffness and... 

The relatively large number of structural elements and the variety of design code requirements complicate the design process of tall buildings. This process is exacerbated when the target is to obtain the seismic code-compliant optimal design with the minimum weight which results in a large-scale and challenging optimization problem. On the other hand, past earthquakes and hurricanes demonstrated that while satisfying the requirements of the conventional design codes guarantees the life safety of the occupants, significant economic losses may still be incurred. This highlights the importance of considering life cycle costs in the design process of the structures. But the issue is that the...