Abstract
The typhoon wind characteristics designing for buildings or bridges located in complex terrain and typhoon prone region normally cannot be achieved by the very often few field measurement data, or by physical simulation in wind tunnel. This study proposes a numerical simulation procedure for predicting directional typhoon design wind speeds and profiles for sites over complex terrain by integrating typhoon wind field model, Monte Carlo simulation technique, CFD simulation and artificial neural networks (ANN).
The site of Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong is chosen as a case study to examine the feasibility of the proposed numerical simulation procedure. Directional typhoon wind fields on the upstream of complex terrain are first generated by using typhoon wind field model together with Monte Carlo simulation method. Then, ANN for predicting directional typhoon wind field at the site are trained using representative directional typhoon wind fields for upstream and these at the site obtained from CFD simulation. Finally, based on the trained ANN model, thousands of directional typhoon wind fields for the site can be generated, and the directional design wind speeds by using extreme wind speed analysis and the directional averaged mean wind profiles can be produced for the site. The case study demonstrated that the proposed procedure is
feasible and applicable, and that the effects of complex terrain on design typhoon wind speeds and wind profiles are significant.
Address
W.F. Huang: School of Civil Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Anhui 230009, China; The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
Y.L. Xu: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
Abstract
Cracking at low temperatures is one of the frequently observed modes of failure in asphalt concretes. In this investigation, fracture tests were performed on cracked asphalt concrete subjected to pure mode I and pure mode II loading at different subzero temperatures. An improved semi-circular bend (SCB) specimen containing a vertical crack was used to conduct the experiments. The SCB specimens produced from the gyratory compacted cylindrical samples were compressively loaded, and critical stress intensity
factors, KIfand KIIf, were then calculated using peak loads obtained from the tests. The experimental results showed that with decreasing the temperature, mode I and mode II critical stress intensity factors increased first but below a certain temperature they both decreased. It was also found that at a fixed temperature, the mode II fracture resistance of the asphalt concrete was higher than its mode I fracture resistance.
Address
Majid-Reza Ayatollahi and Sadjad Pirmohammad: Fatigue and Fracture Laboratory, Center of Excellence in Experimental Solid Mechanics and Dynamics, School of Mechanical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Narmak, Tehran,16846, Iran
Abstract
In this study, the effects of crack depth and crack location on the in-plane free vibration of cracked frame structures have been investigated numerically by using the Finite Element Method. For the rectangular cross-section beam, a crack element is developed by using the principles of fracture mechanics. The effects of crack depth and location on the natural frequency of multi-bay and multi-store frame structures are presented in 3D graphs. The comparison between the present work and the results obtained
from ANSYS shows a very good agreement.
Key Words
cracked frame; free vibration; multi-bay; multi-story; finite element method
Address
Ahmed M. Ibrahim, Hasan Ozturk: Mechanical Engineering Department, Dokuz Eylul University Buca, Izmir, Turkey
Mustafa Sabuncu: The Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Dokuz Eylul University,
Tinaztepe, Buca, Izmir, Turkey
Abstract
This study aimed to develop a model to accurately predict the acceleration of structural systems during an earthquake. The acceleration and applied force of a structure were measured at current time step and the velocity and displacement were estimated through linear integration. These data were used as input to predict the structural acceleration at next time step. The computation tool used was the Volterra/Wiener neural network (VWNN) which contained the mathematical model to predict the acceleration. For alleviating problems of relatively large-dimensional and nonlinear systems, the VWNN model was utilized as the signal processing tool, including the Taylor series components in the input nodes of the neural
network. The number of the intermediate layer nodes in the neural network model, containing the training and simulation stage, was evaluated and optimized. Discussions on the influences of the gradient descent with adaptive learning rate algorithm and the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, both for determining the network weights, on prediction errors were provided. During the simulation stage, different earthquake excitations were tested with the optimized settings acquired from the training stage to find out which of the algorithms would result in the smallest error, to determine a proper simulation model.
Key Words
gradient descent with adaptive learning rate algorithm; Levenberg/Marquardt algorithm; modeling; Taylor series; Volterra/Wiener neural network
Address
Jeng-Wen Lin and Tzung-Han Wu: Department of Civil Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung 407, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Abstract
The present study deals with the dynamics of the flapwise (out-of-plane) vibrations of a rotating, internally damped (Kelvin-Voigt model) tapered Bernoulli-Euler beam carrying a heavy tip mass. The centroid of the tip mass is offset from the free end of the beam and is located along its extended axis. The equation of motion and the corresponding boundary conditions are derived via the Hamilton\'s Principle, leading to a differential eigenvalue problem. Afterwards, this eigenvalue problem is solved by using
Frobenius Method of solution in power series. The resulting characteristic equation is then solved numerically. The numerical results are tabulated for a variety of nondimensional rotational speed, tip mass, tip mass offset, mass moment of inertia, internal damping parameter, hub radius and taper ratio. These are compared with the results of a conventional finite element modeling as well, and excellent agreement is obtained.
Key Words
rotating tapered beam; Bernoulli-Euler beam; Kelvin-Voigt material; heavy tip mass; offset
Address
Serkan Zeren: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey
Metin Gurgoze: 2Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey
Abstract
In the recent decade, practical of wavelet technique is being utilized in various domain of science. Particularly, engineers are interested to the wavelet solution method in the time series analysis. Fundamentally, seismic responses of structures against time history loading such as an earthquake, illustrates optimum capability of systems. In this paper, a procedure using particularly discrete Haar wavelet basis functions is introduced, to solve dynamic equation of motion. In the proposed approach, a straightforward formulation in a fluent manner is derived from the approximation of the displacements. For this purpose, Haar operational matrix is derived and applied in the dynamic analysis. It\'s free-scaled matrix converts
differential equation of motion to the algebraic equations. It is shown that accuracy of dynamic responses relies on, access of load in the first step, before piecewise analysis added to the technique of equation solver in the last step for large scale of wavelet. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this scheme, improved formulations are extended to the linear and nonlinear structural dynamic analysis. The validity and effectiveness of the developed method is verified with three examples. The results were compared with those from the numerical methods such as Duhamel integration, Runge-Kutta and Wilson-
Key Words
dynamic analysis; numerical approximation; Haar wavelet; operational matrix
Address
S.H. Mahdavi: Department of Civil Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Kerman Branch, Kerman, Iran
S. Shojaee: Department of Civil Engineering, Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran
Abstract
In this paper, a new version of gravitational search algorithm based on opposition-based learning (OBGSA) is introduced and applied for optimum design of reinforced concrete retaining walls. The new algorithm employs the opposition-based learning concept to generate initial population and updating agents\' position during the optimization process. This algorithm is applied to minimize three objective functions include weight, cost and CO2 emissions of retaining structure subjected to geotechnical and structural requirements. The optimization problem involves five geometric variables and three variables for
reinforcement setups. The performance comparison of the new OBGSA and classical GSA algorithms on a suite of five well-known benchmark functions illustrate a faster convergence speed and better search ability of OBGSA for numerical optimization. In addition, the reliability and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for optimization of retaining structures are investigated by considering two design examples of retaining walls. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm has high viability, accuracy and stability and significantly outperforms the original algorithm and some other methods in the literature.
Key Words
retaining wall; minimum weight; minimum cost; minimum CO2 emissions; gravitational search algorithm
Address
Mohammad Khajehzadeh, Mohd Raihan Taha: Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, National University of Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
Mahdiyeh Eslami: Department of Electrical Engineering, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
Abstract
Load-carrying capacity of combined members consisted of inner and sleeved tubes subjected to axial compression was investigated in this paper. Considering the initial bending of the inner tube and perfect elasto-plasticity material model, structural behavior of the sleeved member was analyzed by theoretic deduction, which could be divided into three states: the elastic inner tube contacts the outer sleeved tube, only the inner tube becomes plastic and both the inner and outer sleeved tubes become plastic. Curves between axial compressive loads and lateral displacements of the middle sections of the inner tubes were
obtained. Then four sleeved members were analyzed through FEM, and the numerical results were consistent with the theoretic formulas. Finally, experiments of full-scale sleeved members were performed. The results obtained from the theoretical analysis were verified against experimental results. The compressive load-lateral displacement curves from the theoretical analysis and the tests are similar and well indicate the point when the inner tube contacts the sleeved tube. Load-carrying capacity of the inner tube can
be improved due to the sleeved tube. This paper provides theoretical basis for application of the sleeved members in reinforcement engineering.
Key Words
sleeved member; axial compressive load; load-carrying capacity; numerical analysis; experimental study
Address
Bo Hu, Boqing Gao, Shulin Zhan and Cheng Zhang: College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
