Sharif Digital Repository

Usually, resources are short in supply when earthquakes occur. In such emergency situations, disaster relief organizations must use these scarce resources efficiently to achieve the best possible emergency relief. This paper therefore proposes a multi-objective, multi-mode, multi-commodity, and multi-period stochastic model to manage the logistics of both commodities and injured people in the earthquake response. Also, a robust approach is developed and used to make sure that the distribution plan performs well under the various situations that can follow an earthquake. Afterwards, it proposes a solution methodology according to hierarchical objective functions and uses it to illustrate the... 

In this paper, considering horizontal components of seismic excitation, an algorithm for the nonlinear multi-component analysis of building structures by the Endurance Time (ET) method is proposed, and results of the ET method for various steel moment frames with one to seven stories are verified by comparing with the results from Nonlinear Time History Analysis with use of two different sets of ground motions. In addition, several parameters such as eccentricities and irregularities in structure, rotational and lateral stiffness, effect of hysteresis type and ductility have been considered for sensitivity analysis on results, obtained by ET method. Results show that on the basis of... 

Metropolitan areas consist of complicated systems of interconnected infrastructures that are highly interdependent. Disruption of one infrastructure may induce disruption in other interconnected ones. The results from analysis of one infrastructure as an independent system are not realistic without considering the behavior of other interconnected infrastructures. Consequently, the study of the interdependencies among critical infrastructures is important for addressing the cascading effects of a failed infrastructure on the entire network to properly model its performance and help the disaster management team in decision making. In this study, the extended Petri net and Markov chain have... 

Steel plate shear walls are lateral load resisting systems, especially against earthquake excitation. They are constructed with or without stiffeners. Stiffened walls are more ductile than those without stiffeners. In this research a numerical study using finite element analysis via a finite element program is conducted. Nine thin steel plate shear wall models were considered in three groups of 5-storey, 10-storey and 15-storey walls. In each group different yield point steel for the infill plate was used. The yield points of infill plates were assumed to be 160, 200 and 240 MPa. The results showed that using low yield point (LYP) steel will increase energy dissipation of models by up to... 

Endurance Time (ET) method is a new dynamic procedure that has been recently developed for seismic safety evaluation of structures. This method is based on the comparison of seismic response of new-designed or existing structures under intensifying ET records with the pre-assigned damage index. Also this method can efficiently reproduce the seismic responses of the structures excited by scaled earthquakes that are required in time history analysis by the codes. In this paper, first general idea of this new method is described and then is applied to evaluate the seismic safety of a cylindrical steel storage tank under multidirectional excitations. It is shown that the ET method can predict... 

Seismic isolators are used to decrease the energy and forces of earthquakes. The weight of conventional steel-reinforced elastomeric isolators (SREIs) is high, mostly due to the use of multiple steel shim plates. On the contrary, the damping ratio of SREIs is relatively low. Accordingly, this research utilizes a new approach in which the steel shim plates are replaced by carbon and polyamide fibers. This study attempts to obtain the dynamic and mechanical properties of such carbon fiber- and polyamide fiber-reinforced elastomeric isolators, in comparison with SREIs. In this work, a number of specimens were initially designed and manufactured. Afterwards, compression and cyclic shear tests... 

The objective of this paper is to study the improvement in the seismic behavior of concrete gravity dams by optimization of concrete mechanical properties. The criteria to measure the improvement have been: 1) reduction in the extent of cracks and 2) increase in the amount of time dams are able to tolerate earthquakes before failure. The mechanical properties considered have included the density and modulus of elasticity of concrete. The Pine Flat Dam has been selected for this numerical study. During a high intensity earthquake, dams enter a nonlinear phase, where the cracks open and close repeatedly. A smeared crack model has been used for simulation of nonlinearity. For the purpose of... 

The Endurance Time (ET) method is a dynamic analysis procedure using intensifying excitation. The ET excitation functions are generated so that structural performance can be assessed at different excitation levels in a single response history analysis. ET accelerograms, which have been generated so far, possess response spectra consistency; this means that the duration consistency has not been directly considered. Strong-motion duration can influence the response of structures which have stiffness or strength degrading characteristics. In this paper, several well-known strong-motion duration definitions are studied in the context of the ET method. Ground motions are scaled to spectral... 

The total cost of earthquakes is in this paper modeled as a continuous random variable that includes the cost of damage and the cost of construction to prevent damage. Realizations of this variable are obtained by evaluating an array of probabilistic models that take many basic random variables as input. Consequently, analyses can be conducted to determine the mean cost, as well as cost exceedance probabilities and other measures of seismic risk. Such results are employed to address the underlying decision problem, namely to minimize the total cost of earthquakes when that cost is a continuous random variable. Applicable decision theories are outlined and several risk measures are... 

This paper presents a simplified Multi-Degree-Of-Freedom (MDOF) model through modification of fish-bone model (or generic frame). Modified Fish-Bone (MFB) model is developed through three enhancements: (i) the moment of inertia for half-beams is reduced slightly to modify the assumption of equal rotation at each story joints, (ii) a number of truss elements are inserted to the fish-bone model to simulate flexural deformation of moment frames due to axial elongation and contraction of columns, and (iii) moment-rotation relationship of representative rotational springs is supposed to be bilinear instead of trilinear in order to consider simultaneous yielding at both ends of the beam in moment... 

Natural earthquake disasters are unprecedented incidents which take many lives as a consequence and cause major damages to lifeline infrastructures. Various agencies in a country are responsible for reducing such adverse impacts within specific budgets. These responsibilities range from before to after the incident, targeting one of the main phases of disaster management (mitigation, preparedness, and response). Use of OR in disaster management and coordination of its phases has been mostly ignored and highly recommended in former reviews. This paper presents a formulation to coordinate three main agencies and proposes a heuristic approach to solve the different introduced sub-problems. The... 

Long-span bridges usually experience different input excitations at their ground supports that emanate from differences in wave arrival times, and soil conditions, as well as loss of coherency in arriving waves. These spatial variations can drastically influence the dynamic response; hence, this phenomenon must be considered in any vibration-based identification method. There are numerous Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) identification techniques that may be applied to data recorded at long-span bridges that experience spatial variations in their input motions. However, inertial soil-structure interaction effects severely reduce the accuracy of these techniques because the actual Foundation... 

Dynamic characteristics of structures - viz. natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes - are central to earthquake-resistant design. These values identified from field measurements are useful for model validation and health-monitoring. Most system identification methods require input excitations motions to be measured and the structural response; however, the true input motions are seldom recordable. For example, when soil-structure interaction effects are non-negligible, neither the free-field motions nor the recorded responses of the foundations may be assumed as 'input'. Even in the absence of soil-structure interaction, in many instances, the foundation responses are not... 

A library of probabilistic models for prediction of seismic risk is presented. The models are specifically intended for use with reliability methods to compute event probabilities, such as seismic loss probabilities. Several models are presented here for the first time. In particular, new and generic models are proposed for earthquake location, regional loss, building response, building damage, and building loss. Each model is presented with an explanation of its development and a discussion of its predictions. In addition, models from the literature are " smoothed" to make them amenable to reliability analysis. The models are implemented in a new computer program that is tailored for... 

Daily development in civil engineering arena and the importance of economical aspects in the design of structures have motivated the engineers to shift their approaches from designing upon strength to designing upon performance. This is of more importance regarding the forces induced by earthquakes which have unpredicted and random nature. However, it is not possible to design or assess exactly the structural performance against strong ground motion using analytical methods which are applied for static loads and therefore precise dynamic analysis methods are needed. Despite significant progress in the analytical methods and engineering software, using nonlinear time history analysis is very... 

There are many parameters utilized to obtain a more reasonable performance for structures under earthquake excitations in seismic provisions. General considered parameters in seismic provisions are: PGA, importance factor (I) and typical inherent overstrength and global ductility capacity (R). It is well recognized that the main characteristic of the design of structures under seismic excitation is probabilistic rather than deterministic; therefore, it should be determined if whether the probability of structural damage decreases when such parameters change in the design of structures. In this paper, fragility curves are developed in order to evaluate these parameters. Fragility curves are... 

In this paper, the behavior of a concentric braced frame structure equipped with yielding elements (YE), based on energy concepts, has been investigated extensively. When a severe earthquake occurs, energy will get absorbed through structural elements, which causes destruction. In order to reduce structural damage, input energy should be dissipated. YE will act as a fuse and absorb a great deal of earthquake input energy. Two one-story steel frames with different bay-to-height ratios (B/H < 1 and B/H > 1) are investigated. YE is located in the braces intersection. First, through studying the elastic behavior of the frame, the best location, angle and shape of YE is proposed. Subsequently, a... 

One of the methods in limiting tensile stresses in arch dams and removing stress concentrations at the dam-foundation interface is setting the dam body on a concrete saddle called a Pulvino. In the present study, the effects of Pulvino and peripheral joints on the static behavior and seismic performance of arch dams are investigated. Dez Dam with a height of 203 m was selected as a case study and all contraction joints of the dam body were modeled using the discrete crack approach based on as-built drawings. Also, the surrounding rock was modeled as a mass-less medium tied to Pulvino. The dam-reservoirfoundation system was analyzed under static loads accounting for stage construction... 

A significant segment of system identification literature on civil structures is devoted to response-only identification, simply because lack of measurements of input excitations for civil structures is a fairly common scenario. In recent years, several researchers have successfully adapted a second-order blind identification (SOBI) technique-a method originally developed for "blind source separation" of audio signals-to response-only identification of mechanical and civil structures. However, this development had been confined to fully instrumented classically damped systems. While several approaches have been proposed recently for extending SOBI to non-classically damped systems, they all... 

A new concept to determine state of the damage in concrete gravity dams is introduced. The Pine Flat concrete gravity dam has been selected for the purpose of the analysis and its structural capacity, assuming no sliding plane and rigid foundation, has been estimated using the two well-known methods: nonlinear static pushover (SPO) and incremental dynamic analysis (IDA). With the use of these two methods, performance and various limit states of the dam have been determined, and three damage indexes have been proposed on the basis of the comparison of seismic demands and the dam's capacity. It is concluded that the SPO and IDA can be effectively used to develop indexes for seismic performance...