Historic Dam Rehab: Handle with Care
A growing number of dams across the U.S. are aging and in need of rehabilitation, but can they be brought up to current codes without compromising their historic integrity? Improved methods...

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...

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...

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...

Envelope Crossing Rate and First Passage Probability
Various definitions of the envelope of a random response process are discussed. The statistical properties of the random envelope process based on these definitions are then derived and...

Reliability of Control Systems of Building Structures by Active Tendons
In this paper, a numerical assessment on the reliability of a control system of building structures by active cables is performed. Some control experiments on a 23-story shear-wall building...

Safety Evaluation of a Tall Building
This paper uses the extended Kalman filter to perform the system identification of a tall building with the aid of recorded accelerograms obtained from strong-motion seismographs. The...

 

 

 

 

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