Sharif Digital Repository

In performance-based geotechnical earthquake engineering, the required degree and spatial extent of ground densification for mitigation of liquefaction beneath a structure should be determined based on the acceptable levels of performance of foundation. Currently, there is no solution for evaluation of the amount of settlement and tilt of footings constructed on a densified ground which is surrounded by a liquefiable soil. This implies the need for numerical procedures for simulation of seismic behavior of shallow foundations supported on both liquefiable and densified subsoil. In this paper, the dynamic response of shallow foundations on a densified ground is studied using a 3D fully... 

Probabilistic seismic analysis of structures with incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) is a widely used method to offer comprehensive evaluation of the seismic performance of structures. Although IDA is a powerful computer-intensive method, it is really a time-consuming procedure. Accordingly, in this study, for coping with this problem, significant motion duration is used instead of total motion duration. This truncation can significantly reduce the computational effort and time. In order to determine the influence of truncation, fragility curves and their mean annual frequencies (MAF) in each limit state are used with two different damage indices, namely modified Park & Ang and maximum... 

In seismic resistant design of moment frames, the structure behavior under earthquakes has to be examined considering various damage criteria. Damage indices can be estimated by Endurance Time (ET) method with minimum computational effort. The quality of this estimation can be improved in different ways. In this paper, the graphs of a certain damage index versus natural period of the structure, called damage spectra, are produced applying intensifying ET records and scaled Ground Motions (GM). Then, the excitation duration of ET acceleration functions (target time) is modified in order to reach acceptable consistency between ET and GM damage spectra. Moreover, various damage indices of a... 

The main objective of this study is the development of endurance time (ET) excitations in order to take structural response uncertainty into account for use in performance-based earthquake engineering. There are several uncertainties in earthquake engineering, including earthquake occurrence, structural response, damage, and loss. In the current research, structural response uncertainty is directly included in the ET method, which is an analysis method used for performing structural behavior assessment under seismic actions. Conventional practice of the ET method does not provide any information about seismic response distribution. Despite the simplicity of the ET method, it is an accurate... 

Braced frames, besides other structural systems, such as moment resisting frames or shear walls, have been an effective and valuable method to enhance structures against lateral loads. In wind or seismic excitations, inclined elements react as truss web elements which would bear compression or tension stresses. This axial reaction results in less moments and therefore smaller sizes in beam and column sections with respect to members in similar moment resisting frame. However, low tensile strength of concrete material, made it a challenge to use in inclined members. In practice, there have been various methods to consider this defect such as disengagement of brace elements in tension or... 

The effect of soil-structure interaction (SSI) on hysteresis energy demand of buildings using an ensemble of alluvium site records was investigated. The structure and the soil were molded separately and then combined to constitute the soil-structure model using the sub-structure method. The key parameters effecting the response of the soil-structure system were found to be a non-dimensional frequency as a representative of structure to soil stiffness ratio; and aspect ratio of the building. It was found that the hysteric energy dissipated in a structure under an earthquake can be highly effected when the stiffness of the soil beneath the structure is altered  

Endurance time method is a dynamic analysis in which structures are subjected to increasing excitations. These excitations are generated to be compatible with ground motions. Conventional excitation generating processes take into consideration the dynamic characteristics related to intensity and frequency contents of ground motions; however, duration-related characteristics have never been considered directly. In this study, the existing methodology is extended to include Cumulative Absolute Velocity as a duration-related parameter in the generating process. These newly generated excitations are then employed to estimate nonlinear responses of three concrete structures as case studies.... 

This article presents an overview of the mechanical design and fabrication of a Rescue Robot (CEDRA) for operation in unstructured environments. In order to obtain an appropriate mechanism for climbing the stairs, a novel method has been developed. In this kinematics-based approach we don't need to perform any dynamic analysis which is highly complicated and time consuming for most rovers. According to the essential characteristics needed for rovers, two objective functions were defined. We have shown that the new mechanism performs better on rough terrains than the previous well-known mechanism widely used in the Mars rovers. Moreover the design parameters are optimized by means of Genetic... 

In this article a new technique for the dynamic response of structures is investigated. This applied procedure can predict the approximate seismic performance of the structures and it is fast, inexpensive and results are reasonably acceptable. In fact, this novel method logically combines two different techniques, 'incremental dynamic analysis (IDA)' and 'modal pushover analysis (MPA)', presented by other researchers. This method will take advantage of both methodical ideas such as equivalent single degree of freedom of multi-degree structures and the implementation of different scaled level of an earthquake record to the provided equivalent SDF structure. Using this procedure, simple... 

Most seismic design codes accept heavy damages to buildings in case of large earthquakes, provided that they are prevented against collapse. However, this leads to unacceptable consequences, such as very large volume of the required reconstruction works, in large populated cities. One way to get rid of these adverse consequences is using the idea of combining rocking/seesaw motion of the building's structure and energy dissipation at base level to create buildings easily repairable even after a large earthquake. In the present study, this idea has been employed for designing steel buildings with seesaw motion capability by using a central massive column at ground floor, with elastic behavior... 

This paper introduces an efficient stochastic method to produce fully nonstationary records having multiple peaks in power spectrum. The zero-crossing characteristics of the acceleration, velocity, and displacement time histories of the output signal are used to estimate the model parameters. This procedure is utilized to resimulate 252 non-pulse-like, horizontal near-field records with rupture distance of less than 10 km and strike–slip mechanism. The model parameters are regressed against moment magnitude, rupture distance, hypo-central depth, and shear wave velocity, enabling the scenario-based simulation of the records. The response spectra of the simulated records are compared with... 

In this paper, a new method is proposed for identification of inelastic shear frame structures with hesteresis, using data collected on their dynamic response. It uses the. Prandtl-Ishlinskii rate independent model for hysteresis, which was originally used in the field of plasticity and ferromagnetism. The proposed identification method is capable, of identifying the. mass, damping and restoring force of a frame, structure, which can be. used in forming the. equations of motion of the.frame. By solving the equations of motion, the. dynamic response is predicted. The method is based on the.combined use. of Quadratic Programming (QP) and Genetic Algorithms (GA). First, assuming a set of... 

In this paper, a technique for the study of nonlinear performance of structures in different levels of earthquakes is developed. In this method, the Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) curves are not achieved from nonlinear dynamic analysis of multi-degree-of-freedom (MDF) structure. However, the procedure of constructing these curves is based on modelling of the entire structure with several single-degrees-of-freedom (SDF) structures and evaluating them through the modal pushover analysis method. An innovative idea for approximating pushover curves that is based on error distribution is introduced in this investigation. Furthermore, the total input energy applied towards the SDF oscillator,... 

Seismic response of a Single Degree of Freedom (SDOF) system containing a rigid circular cylindrical liquid tank under the earthquake excitations is considered in the presence of fluid/structure interaction. The governing differential equations of the system is derived considering the first three liquid sloshing modes (1, 1), (0, 1) and (2, 1) under different strong ground motions. The dynamic response of the system is investigated in the neighborhood of 1:1 and 1:2 internal resonances between the SDOF system and the liquid sloshing modes. These internal resonances take place by tuning the frequency of the first asymmetric sloshing mode of the liquid to the fundamental frequency of the SDOF... 

The influence of uplift on earthquake response of tall buildings via consideration the horizontal and vertical components of earthquake excitation with and without foundation uplift has been studied. A new finite element modeling method called direct modeling approach are utilized in this study to evaluate the variation of foundation uplift, lateral displacement, base shear and members' forces in each cases. The earthquake response of the models mentioned above, assuming linear behavior was compared to the response in nonlinear behavior. These studies show the importance of uplift foundation on the seismic behavior of tall buildings. The most important results in this study is base shear... 

Liquefaction is a phenomenon through which saturated sandy soil loses its shear strength and turns into a liquefied state. One of the most detrimental consequences of liquefaction is the reconsolidation volumetric settlements after the earthquakes, which is due to the dissipation of excess pore pressure caused by earthquakes. Severe floods can follow these settlements in free fields such as grounds close to the sea or rivers. Several researchers studied this phenomenon using data obtained from experiments in the lab or observations in the fields. Previous works were mainly based on a limited number of experimental observations and considered loadings and boundary conditions that were... 

This paper presents a novel computer vision-based methodology for assessment of the seismic damage in reinforced concrete moment frames using visual characteristics of surface damage following an earthquake. An extensive collected database comprising 974 images associated with 256 cyclic-loaded damaged beam-column joints, providing a set of cracking and crushing progression with increasing the evolution of damage level, is collected and used for the development and validation of the methodology. Employing image processing techniques, the characteristics of the surface damage, including the cracking length and crushing areas, are measured and used in a scenario-based assessment for the... 

This study proposes predictive equations for estimating the peak-experienced drift ratio of unreinforced masonry walls based on the visual characteristic of the damages. In this regard, a comprehensive database comprised of 190 images associated with 30 unreinforced masonry walls at different drift ratios between 0.0 and 1.1 percent is collected, and the visual features of the progressive damages are extracted. Various image processing filters are implemented to the images to quantify the cracking length and crushing areas. The filters are capable of distinguishing different crack patterns, such as joint cracking and block cracking. In the following, four scenarios are introduced based on... 

The performance of several regression methods is investigated to estimate the distribution of engineering demand parameters conditioned on intensity measures (EDP|IM) for small record sets. In particular, the performance of the multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS), a simultaneous mean-variance regression (MVR) done by a penalized weighted least-square loss function, and a mean-covariance/variance regression based on expectation maximization method (EM) are assessed. The efficiency of the introduced methods is compared with FEMA-P58 methodology. Performance assessment of EM and MVR methods shows that the overall increase in efficiency is about 25–45% for maximum inter-story drift ratios,...