Post‐earthquake fire resistance of CFRP strengthened reinforced concrete structures

Post‐earthquake fire (PEF) presents a high risk to buildings that have been partially damaged in a prior earthquake, particularly in urban areas. As most standards and criteria ignore the possibility of fire after earthquake, buildings are not adequately designed for that possibility, and thus, PEF is a high‐risk load needed to be scrutinized further, codified and become part of a routine design. An investigation based on sequential analysis inspired by FEMA356 is performed here on two RC frames, of three and five stories, at the Life Safety performance level and designed to the ACI 318‐08 code, after they have been subjected to a spectral peak ground acceleration of 0.35 g. A fire analysis of the weakened structures follows, from which the time it takes for the damaged structures to collapse is determined. As a point of reference, the fire resistance is also determined for undamaged structures and before the occurrence of earthquake. The results show that structures previously damaged by the earthquake and exposed to PEF are considerably more vulnerable than those that have not been damaged previously. A method using carbon fiber‐reinforced polymer as a means of relocation of plastic hinges away from the column faces towards the beams is introduced as a function of the time required for fire extinguishment or evacuation. This is carried out to increase the structural load‐carrying capacity, thus reducing the potential damage for the anticipated earthquake and thereby improve the PEF resistance. The results show a considerable improvement in the PEF resistance of the frames. While the investigation and the proposition relate to a certain class of structures (ordinary buildings, intermediate RC structures, three and five stories) and the results can therefore be applied only to the cases investigated, it is hoped that this study paves the way for further research into this very important phenomenon and leads to an eventual revision of codes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Two Novel Adaptive Transmission Schemes in a Decode-and-Forward Relaying Network

Wireless Personal Communications - Adaptive transmission in a cooperative network with a half-duplex relay operating in decode-and-forward mode is considered. The main purpose of the paper is...     

A simplified method for collapse capacity assessment of moment-resisting frame and shear wall structural systems

A simplified methodology for predicting the median and dispersion of collapse capacity of moment-resisting frame and shear wall structural systems subjected to seismic excitations is proposed. The method is based on nonlinear static (pushover) analysis. Simple mathematical models denoted as “generic structures” are utilized to model moment-resisting frames and shear walls. After examining a wide range of structural parameters of the generic structures, a comprehensive database of collapse fragilities and pushover curves (using ASCE 7-05 lateral load pattern) are generated. Based on the obtained pushover curves, closed-form equations for estimation of median and dispersion of building collapse fragility curves are developed using multivariate regression analysis. Comparing the estimates of the median collapse capacity calculated from the closed-form equations with the actual collapse capacities determined from nonlinear response-history analysis indicates that the simplified methodology is reliable. The effectiveness of this methodology for predicting the median collapse capacity of frame and wall structures is further demonstrated with two case studies of structural systems designed based on current seismic provisions.     

Performance evaluation of different types of steel moment resisting frames subjected to strong ground motion through incremental dynamic analysis

Comparative studies on seismic performance for various types of steel moment resisting frames subjected to near field and far field earthquakes are performed through Incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) method in this study. Near field earthquake has a pulse like effects on the structures. It imports immediate force in very short duration to buildings. Therefore, destructive effects of surge energy are not negligible. Four intensity indices are used, namely, peak acceleration (PGA), spectral acceleration at the structure??s first-mode period (S_a(T₁, 5%)), spectral acceleration at the structure??s nth effective-mode period (S_a(T_n, 5%)) and the Spectral velocity at the structure??s first-mode period (S_v(T₁, 5%)). Numerical results illustrate that the intensity measure parameters related to ground velocity and the higher mode-related parameters present better correlation with the seismic responses of near source ground motion for given systems. The higher mode-related parameters are more suitable for tall systems subjected to near field earthquakes. Moreover, the chosen parameters S_a(T_n, 5%) and S_v(T₁, 5%) of near-fault impulsive ground motions enhance the performance of intensity measure of corresponding conventional parameters, i.e. S_a(T₁, 5%). A comparison for the special and intermediate steel moment resisting frames is made as regard to performance using IDA method. A more efficient performance is observed for the special moment resisting frames compare to intermediate ones.     

A new application of an improved DRBEM model for water wave propagation over a frictional uneven bottom

This paper presents a numerical scheme to approximate water wave diffraction, refraction and frictional dissipation over an axi-symmetric pit. Based on an improved extended mild-slope equation (EMSE) including bottom friction effect, as the elliptic governing differential equation, dual reciprocity boundary element method (DRBEM) is employed to model water wave propagation over an axi-symmetric pit. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first application of DRBEM for water wave scattering over a pit. In order to promote accuracy of the model, not only effects of the bottom curvature and the slope-squared terms which are neglected in the mild-slope equation (MSE), are considered, but also effect of the bottom friction is measured by the improved EMSE. Numerical results are compared with existing analytical or numerical solutions or with experimental data by several examples. Through these numerical experiments reliability and efficiency of present DRBEM model for determining the total wave field over an uneven bottom is approved.     

Automated program repair using genetic programming and model checking

Automated program repair is still a highly challenging problem mainly due to the reliance of the current techniques on test cases to validate candidate patches. This leads to the increasing unreliability of the final patches since test cases are partial specifications of the software. In the present paper, an automated program repair method is proposed by integrating genetic programming (GP) and model checking (MC). Due to its capabilities to verify the finite state systems, MC is employed as an appropriate criterion for evolving programs to calculate the fitness in GP. The application of MC for the fitness evaluation, which is novel in the context of program repair, addresses an important gap in the current heuristic approaches to the program repair. Being focused on fault detection based on the desired aspects, it enables the programmers to detect faults according to the definition of properties. Creating a general method, this characteristic can be effectively customized for different domains of application and the corresponding faults. Apart from various types of faults, the proposed method is capable of handling concurrency bugs which are not the case in many general repair methods. To evaluate the proposed method, it was implemented as a tool, named JBF, to repair Java programs. To meet the objectives of the study, some experiments were conducted in which certain programs with known bugs were automatically repaired by the JBF tool. The obtained results are encouraging and remarkably promising.