Regarding Nature as Raw or Cooked
Tensions between nature and technological culture are mounting as never before. On one side are the deep ecologists who claim the industrial capitalist system has raped the world of nature....
Is It Good Business to Be a Citizen Engineer?
When does community involvement cloud the engineer's judgment? Does the engineer have to sacrifice business success in the name of public service? The first canon in the ASCE...
Retrofitting Fossil Plant Facilities Structural Perspectives
This publication, Retrofitting Fossil Plant Facilities: Structural Perspectives, was prepared by the Retrofit Task Committee of the Fossil Power Committee of the American Society of Civil...
Seattle's Good Neighbor Policy
The West Point wastewater treatment plant in Seattle sits on a spit of land jutting into Puget Sound. Close by is Discovery Park, a haven for nature lovers, located on a bluff above the...
Pumping Oil, Treating Soil
Oil was discovered on hilltop land in Signal Hill, Calif., in 1921, setting off one of the most wild land rushes the state has ever seen. Some 70 years and 20,000 oil wells later, the...
Excavating, OSHA-Style
When the Occupational Safety and Health Administration implemented its new, tougher trenching guidelines in July 1990, the agency opened the door for inventive excavation techniques. Contractors...
Man and Huge System Interaction
In many cases of disaster, the causes of failure of huge systems are frequently attributed to human error. However human is liable to error. To exclude human factor from a huge system...
Wind-Induced Response of Torsionally Coupled Buildings
This paper summarizes the results of a comprehensive three-dimensional dynamic analysis of tall buildings subjected to fluctuating wind forces. Random vibration theory is used to relate...
Identification of Critical Load Distributions for Wind Loading
For practical application as well as for sophisticated investigations, the time dependent stochastic wind process has to be simplified in terms of input data to the calculation. Usually,...
Optimal Distribution of Tuned Mass Dampers in Wind-Sensitive Structures
Modern high-rise buildings are susceptible to excessive accelerations at the upper floors in wind storms due to flexibility and low damping. In order to keep acceleration levels below...
Automated Damage-Controlled Design of RC Buildings
This paper presents an automated damage-controlled design method, which aims for uniform damage distribution throughout the entire building frame while respecting the strong-column weak-beam...
Response Modification Factors for Buildings and Bridges
Response Modification Factors (RMF) are often used for the seismic design and the safety evaluation of buildings and bridges. The advantage of using RMF is to account for the nonlinear...
Wind Vs. Seismic Design
This paper is concerned with the reliability analysis of building structures subjected to multiple natural hazards (seismic and wind in this case) within the framework of contemporary...
Reliability-Based Design Codes
Reliability analysis for code-designed simple structures subjected to earthquake loading are being determined using both static and dynamic methods and strength-based and damage-related...
A Seismic PRA Procedure in Japan and its Application to a Building Performance Safety Estimation: Part 2. Fragility Analysis
In this paper, a practical seismic fragility evaluation method for structure and equipment systems is proposed. Structural and equipment failures are considered here, reflecting detailed...
Reliability-Based Design Requirements for Foundations of Buildings Subjected to Earthquake
Optimum seismic design coefficients and safety factors with respect to shear and overturning failure modes are obtained for a set of multi-story frame buildings idealized as single-mass...
The Application of Reliability Based Design for Earthquake Resistant Communications Structures
Current earthquake design criteria consists of applying equivalent lateral static forces embodied in design codes. The structures designed in conformance with such provisions and principles...
Design of Buildings Under Earthquake Loadings Using Three-Stage Friction-Grip Elements
A simple method is given for the design of earthquake resistant buildings using three-stage friction-grip elements. Predesign is done by static analysis and verification is performed by...
Safety Improvement of Earthquake Loaded Structures Application of Semi-Active Control in Multi-Storey Buildings
This paper presents the studies for development of a new concept of aseismic design of structures. Basis of that engineering will be a structural optimization including elastic supported...
Assessment of Safety of Existing Buildings Using Fuzzy Set Theory
In this paper, an approach to estimate structural safety which may serve as a bridge between the theoretical and empirical approaches is explored. The new method combines subjective judgment...
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