Sharif Digital Repository

Observed performance of nonstructural components and building contents during recent earthquakes demonstrated their significance to control economic seismic losses and downtime. Since a large portion of nonstructural equipments installed in buildings are acceleration sensitive devices, reasonable estimation of the acceleration they undergo during an earthquake has an important role in rational design of secondary systems and subsequently in reducing the earthquake damages. Although a comprehensive amount of research studies have been conducted to date to approximate the floor acceleration demands of a multistory building subjected to the earthquake ground motion, in most work, the soil... 

Statistical studies indicate the fact that in Iran, like many other developing countries, a significant percentage of buildings are made of traditional materials and most of them are adobe buildings especially in rural areas. Furthermore, geological data indicates that Iran is located in alps-Himalayas seismic zone and exposed by destructive earthquakes and adobe buildings suffer the most damages comparing with other type of the structures. According to these explanations, this research deals with adobe buildings behavior and provides solutions for reinforcing them and improving the seismic response of these buildings. These studies include numerical modeling with finite elements methods by... 

Soil-structure interaction has significant effect on dynamic behavior of the super structure. This effect is usually investigated in two separate parts, i.e., the Kinematic Interaction effect and the Inertial Interaction effect. The first modifies the input ground motion to the foundation as a result of difference in soil and foundation stiffness. The later, i.e., the II effect, introduces the effect of soil flexibility and radiation of waves into the supporting medium on the response of the structure. These effects are usually considered by introducing a replacement oscillator with modified natural period and damping ratio subjected... 

Controlling damage level of structures for an earthquake with certain intensity is the main purpose in seismic performance based design. This is done by estimating and confining the structure displacements and related global and local response parameters. Even though nonlinear time history analysis method is the most exact method for predicting seismic behavior of structures, but its application is limited because of being complex. Nonlinear static analysis procedure (Pushover analysis) which is based on analyzing the structure subjected to the incremental lateral load is an alternative method that has been recommended by recent structural codes. In order to consider the soil-structure... 

The main purpose of this study is to estimate the natural frequency and damping ratio for soil-structure systems with embedded foundation with sufficient accuracy. The results are then compared to guidelines in current seismic codes. This is done through an extensive parametric study using a set of non-dimensional parameters, which define the soil-structure systems. For this purpose a simplified soil-structure model is used. Although more rigorous models and numerical solutions are available, they are time consuming and not suitable for parametric study. Existing formula for seismic provisions for the equivalent period and damping ratio of soil-structure systems are based on studies on... 

Earthquakes are one of the greatest natural hazards. Hazard mitigation requires studies in many areas including geotechnical aspects of earthquake engineering. Characteristics of seismic waves change significantly as they pass through soft soil layers near the earth's surface. This phenomenon, commonly known as site effects or site response, is a major factor influencing the extent of damage on structures. Processing of seismic data recorded during earthquakes is one of the most reliable methods to study site effects. The ground motions generated during earthquakes are nonstationary with respect to both amplitude and frequency. The state-of-the-art time-frequency distributions when applied... 

In order to simplify the dynamic analysis of soil-structure systems, the structural element of the foundation is usually assumed to be rigid. While the rigid foundation assumption is acceptable for block-type machine foundations, it may influence the dynamic response of other structures such as structures with a central rigid core. Previous research has shown that the flexibility of the foundation structural elements affect dynamic stiffness of underlying soil so it can change the structural response. The aim of this thesis is to study the influence of foundation flexibility on the global response of soil-structure systems including structures with a rigid core. Since the response of the... 

It is several decades that the effect of soil-structure interaction (SSI) has been known to engineers. Many methods have been developed to estimate this effect, but modal analysis of soil-structure systems is one of the most popular techniques due to its simplicity and better insight. Due to this reasons, modal analysis found its place in codes and provisions such as NEHRP. Presence of soil beneath the structure not only would alter the natural periods and damping ratio of structure but also would impose some new vibration modes to the system due to soil’s degrees of freedom. Consequently, response of structure is a combination of the effects of all these modes. But, in practice,... 

The effect of soil structure interaction, on displacement modification factor in constant reduction factors (CR) is evaluated, studied for SDOF structures placed on flexible base modeled by 3DOF system as the base foundation (a sway, a rocking and an internal degree of freedom to see the frequency dependency of dynamic stiffness of soil). 60 records of FEMA-440 for 3 types of soils (B, C and D) are analyzed for 28 different soil-structure conditions, 6 different level of reduction factors, and varied secondary hardening for 2 different hysteresis behavior to see the effect of stiffness hardening. Results are plotted in spectrums to see the role of Tn.
Final results show that effect of... 

Dynamic characteristics of structures—viz., natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes—are central to earthquake resistant design (model validation) and health monitoring. For civil structures like buildings and bridges, these characteristics can be highly influenced by surrounding soil in addition to the super-structure’s properties and cannot be correctly estimated using numerical modeling. For example, soil’s flexibility decreases the natural frequencies of the system; and in most cases, soil provides additional damping due to material hysteresis and radiation. On account of this fact, system identification techniques must be applied to extract such information from field data,... 

Usually the structures are designed based on the fixed-base assumption; however thisassumption is not always correct and the bed flexibility should be considered. This effectwhich is called soil-structure interaction, change the response of structure on both elasticand inelastic behavior. In the regulations for the design of structures on flexible base,generally soil-structure system is replaced with an equivalent fixed base structure; in theway that the design force of soil-structure system with reasonable accuracy can beestimated by equivalent fixed-base structure. In some regulations, dynamic characteristicsof equivalent structure have been determined on elastic state and the results have... 

Regarding to the value and the modeling, damping has remarkable effect on the response of the systems. More over the structural damping the soil damping also exist in the soil-structure systems. Damping resources in soil include material damping and radiation damping. The high amount of radiation damping in some cases have been led to paying less attention to material damping in some studeis. Although in many cases this is not true and in systems with little radiation damping the material damping could be really important. Generally the role of soil damping depends on the properties of the structure. On the other hand in structures with multi-degree of freedom, soil existence affects the... 

The main objective of this study is to identify the contribution of different damping mechanisms in equivalent damping of inelastic soil- structure systems which can be used to reach a better estimation of inelastic soil- structure systems response using some simplified methods. This mechanisms include the material damping of soil and structure, radiation damping of soil and also the structure’s nonlinear behavior. Despite the studies have been done, even in the fixed base systems, there is not an exact prediction for the contribution rate of inherent damping and energy absorption related to nonlinear behavior in equivalent damping of system. Considering the flexibility of soil under the... 

In this research, the effect of nonlinear behavior of soil on the nonlinear responses of super-structure has been investigated. During the design process of practical buildings, engineers usually disregard the effect of soil-structure interaction. In some cases in which the effect of soil-structure interaction is considered, nonlinear behavior of soil usually is modeled through an equivalent linear method which is proposed by the most existing design codes. Past studies show that considering the effect of soil-structure interaction, could change the responses of super-structure in comparison with those whose base are fixed. In many of these studies, nonlinear behavior of beneath soil is... 

Recent studies on inelastic behavior of soil-structure systems indicate that seismic design codes provisions, which use the same response modification factor for fixed base structures and soil-structure systems, are not appropriate and could lead to an increase in ductility demand of structures (as a part of soil-structure system). As a result, to reduce design base shear and design forces with regards to collaboration of soil-structure interaction could be in non-conservative manner. In all of these studies, the ductility component of the response modification factor (i.e. Rµ ) has been the major concern and the overstrength component has been ignored. However, the existence of... 

Base flexibility of structures, cause changes in seismic input motions to the structure, and hence, result in variations in structural seismic responses. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as soil-structure interaction (SSI). The effect of base flexibility on seismic responses is usually investigated from two main aspects: 1) Kinematic interaction (KI) , 2) Inertial Interaction (II). KI effects are induced, first, because of the stiffness contrast between the foundation and the flexible base, and second, because of phase difference of the receiving waves in the contact boundary between the foundation and the flexible base. These effects may results in variations in frequency content of... 

Since the early 1980s, it is well-known that the dynamic properties of structures are effected by flexibility of the underlying soil due to Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI). As a result, the soil-structure systems usually has a longer natural period and higher damping ratio that structure would have in the fixed-base state. The importance of SSI effect as well as the complexity of the phenomenon have made it the subject of several researches for the last four decades. It also has found its way into some seismic codes and provisions as simplified guidelines.In the present paper, a simplified 3DOF model is suggested as the soil-structure system by replacing the structure by a SDOF model using... 

In this research the flexibility of subterranean levels on foundation input motion (FIM), especially rocking component is investigated through parameter analyses. The so-called motion is induced as a result of kinematic soil-structure interaction (SSI). The foregoing interaction reduces the translational component of foundation input motion in rigid embedded foundations when compared to the free-field motion (FFM), as well as yielding rocking component in the foundation. On the other hand, increasing the embedment depth which is equivalent to the presence of subterranean levels in a building decreases the commonly-held “rigid” assumption’s accuracy for the embedded part. Given this effect,... 

This thesis contains experimental studies on mechanical properties of adobe and mud material and investigating seismic performance of a conventional adobe house using shake table tests. Mechanical properties of adobe and mud material were studied experimentally based on ASTM and BS standard tests. These experiments were designed to evaluate compressive strength of adobe sun-dried blocks and mud mortar cubes. Besides, shear behavior and tensile bond strength of adobe assemblages were under consideration and shear tests were done on adobe panels. As next part of the research, several shaking table tests were conducted on a dome-roof adobe house as a conventional representative of arch-roof... 

Settlement and tilt of structures due to liquefaction of subsoil layers is a major cause of damage during earthquake. One of the main approaches to reduce terrible effects of liquefaction on shallow foundations is ground improvement. Among the variety of ground improvement methods, the densification-based methods have been more paid attention for liquefaction mitigation. For liquefaction hazard mitigation using densification methods, three basic values should be determined i.e. depth, lateral extent, and degree of improvement (percent increase in Dr). In the current design practice, the need for ground improvement is usually decided based on the semi-empirical methods for assessment of...