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Structural walls are used extensively in moderate- and high-rise buildings to resist lateral loads induced by earthquakes. The seismic performance of many buildings is, therefore, closely linked to the behavior of the reinforced concrete walls. The analytical models used in this paper are developed to study the push-over response of T-shaped reinforced concrete walls andinvestigate the influence of the flange walls on laterally loaded walls and nonlinear behavior of shear walls, namely strength, ductility and failure mechanisms. A layered nonlinear finite element method is used to study the behavior of T-shaped and rectangular (barbell) shear walls. This paper introduces a computer program to practically study three-dimensional characteristics of reinforced concrete wall response by utilizing layered modeling. The program is first verified bysimulated and reported experimental response of 3-D reinforced concrete shear walls. Subsequently, a study considering eighteen analytical test specimens of T-shaped and barbell shear walls is carried out. Finally, based on analytical results, a new equation for minimum ratio of shear wall area to floor-plan area is proposed.

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The seismic response of pile-supported offshore structures is strongly affected by the nonlinear behavior of the supporting piles. Nonlinear response of piles is the most important source of potentially nonlinear dynamic response of offshore platforms due to earthquake excitations. It is often necessary to perform dynamic analysis of offshore platforms that accountsfor soil nonlinearity, discontinuity condition at pile soil interfaces, energy dissipation through soil radiation damping and structural non linear behaviors of piles.In this paper, an attempt is made to develop an inexpensive and practical procedure compatible with readily available structural analysis software for estimating the lateral response of flexible piles embedded in layered soil deposits subjected to seismic loading. In the proposed model a BNWF (Beam on Nonlinear Winkler Foundation) approach is used consisting of simple nonlinear springs, dash pots and contact elements. Gapping and caving-in conditions at the pile-soil interfaces are also considered using special interface elements. This model was incorporated into a Finite Element program (ANSYS), which was used to compute the response of laterally excited piles. A linear approach was used for seismic free field ground motion analysis. The computed responses compared well with the Centrifuge test results.This paper deals with the effects of free field ground motion analysis on seismic non linear behavior of embedded piles. Different parts of a BNWF (Beam on Nonlinear Winkler Foundation) model, together with quantitative and qualitative findings and conclusions for dynamic nonlinear response of offshore piles, are discussed and addressed in detail. The proposed BNWF model (only using the existing features of the available general finite element software) could easily be implemented in a more comprehensive model of nonlinear seismic response analysis of pile supported offshore platforms.

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In the past decade design procedure changed to �performance-based design� from�force-based design�, by this mean many researchers focused on nonlinear static analysis (NSA)and the procedure named �PUSHOVER�. Advantages of this method are defining the inelasticbehavior of structure without nonlinear dynamic analysis (NDA) effort and also defining plastichinges formation in critical elements, and the order of formed plastic hinges. In spite of these goodadvantages NSA is limited to short and planar structures and application of that in tall andtorsionaly asymmetric structures may yield unreliable results.In this study reliability of NSA is investigated by performing both nonlinear static and dynamicanalysis on six 2D moment resisting concrete frames. Non linear dynamic analysis has been doneby the suggested method in FEMA356 guideline called �Target Displacement Method�. A groupof 4 different lateral increasing loads were used in pushover analysis and 3 different groundmotions were applied in NDA. Results indicate that same responses can be obtained by performingNSA, but errors will be increased by frames height increment.

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Pushover analysis is a simplified nonlinear analysis technique that can be used to estimate the dynamic demands imposed on a structure under earthquake excitations. One of the first steps taken in this approximate solution is to assess the maximum roof displacement, known as target displacement, using the base shear versus roof displacement diagram. That could be done by the so-called dynamic pushover analysis, i.e. a dynamic time history analysis of an equivalent single degree of freedom model of the original system, as well as other available approximate static methods. In this paper, a number of load patterns, including a new approach, are considered to construct the related pushover curves. In a so-called dynamic pushover analysis, the bi-linear and tri-linear approximations of these pushover curves were used to assess the target displacements by performing dynamic nonlinear time history analyses. The results obtained for five different special moment resisting steel frames, using five earthquake records were compared with those resulted from the time history analysis of the original system. It is shown that the dynamic pushover analysis approach, specially, with the tri-linear approximation of the pushover curves, proves to have a better accuracy in assessing the target displacements. On the other hand, when nonlinear static procedure seems adequate, no specific preference is observed in using more complicated static procedures (proposed by codes) compared to the simple first mode target displacement assessment.

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A parametric study is performed to assess the influence of the tension reinforcement index, ( ω = ρ fy /f Bc), and the bending moment distribution (loading type) on the ultimate deformation characteristics of reinforced concrete (RC) beams. The analytical results for 15 simply supported beams with different amounts of tension reinforcement ratio under three different loading conditions are presented and compared with the predictions of the various formulations and the experimental data, where available. The plastic hinge rotation capacity increases as the loading is changed from the concentrated load at the middle to the third-point loading, and it is a maximum for the case of the uniformly distributed load. The effect of the loading type on the plastic rotation capacity of the heavily reinforced beams is not as significant as that for the lightly reinforced beams. Based on the analytical results obtained using the nonlinear finite element method, new simple equations as a function of the tension reinforcement index, ω, and the loading type are proposed. The analytical results indicate that the proposed equations can be used for analysis of ultimate capacity and the associated deformations of RC beams with sufficient accuracy.

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The nonlinear static pushover analysis technique is mostly used in the performance-based design of structures and it is favored over nonlinear response history analysis. However, the pushover analysis with FEMA load distributions losses its accuracy in estimating seismic responses of long period structures when higher mode effects are important. Some procedures have been offered to consider this effect. FEMA and Modal pushover analysis (MPA) are addressed in the current study and compared with inelastic response history analysis. These procedures are applied to medium high-rise (10 and 15 storey) and high-rise (20 and 30 storey) frames efficiency and limitations of them are elaborated. MPA procedure present significant advantage over FEMA load distributions in predicting storey drifts, but the both are thoroughly unsuccessful to predict hinge plastic rotations with acceptable accuracy. It is demonstrated that the seismic demands determined with MPA procedure will be unsatisfactory in nonlinear systems subjected to individual ground motions which inelastic SDF systems related to significant modes of the buildings respond beyond the elastic limit. Therefore, it’s inevitable to avoid evaluating seismic demands of the buildings based on individual ground motion with MPA procedure.

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The work presented in this paper investigates the causes of size effects in structural-concrete members. It is

based on the use of a finite-element model found to yield realistic predictions of structural-concrete behavior in all

cases investigated to date. In fact, the previous use of this model in investigations of size effects in reinforced-concrete

beams indicated that such effects reflect the dependence of load-carrying capacity on small unintended eccentricities

of the applied load and/or load-induced anisotropy, rather than, as widely considered, on fracture-mechanics

characteristics. The present work extends the scope of the above investigation so as to include the case of reinforced

concrete flanged shear walls, the behavior of which is already established experimentally. It is found that, unlike the

flanged shear walls with a height-to-length ratio larger than 2, the shear walls investigated in the present work, in

contrast with the interpretation given to recently published experimental findings, are size-effect independent.

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This paper describes a numerical model and its finite element implementation that used to compute the cavitation effects on

seismic behavior of concrete dam and reservoir systems. The system is composed of two sub-systems, namely, the reservoir and

the dam. The water is considered as bilinear compressible and inviscid and the equation of motion of fluid domain is expressed

in terms of the pressure variable alone. A bilinear state equation is used to model the pressure–density relationship of a cavitated

fluid. A standard displacement finite element formulation is used for the structure. The Structural damping of the dam material

and the radiation damping of the water and damping from foundation soil and banks have been incorporated in the analysis. The

solution of the coupled system is accomplished by solving the two sub-systems separately with the interaction effects at the damreservoir

interface enforced by a developed iterative scheme. The developed method is validated by testing it against problem for

which, there is existing solution and the effects of cavitation on dynamic response of Konya gravity dam and Morrow Point arch

dam subjected to the first 6 s of the May 1940 El-Centro, California earthquake, is considered. Obtained results show that impact

forces caused by cavitation have a small effect on the dynamic response of dam-reservoir system.

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In the first impounding of rockfill dams, additional settlements occur in upstream side in saturated rockfills due to collapse
phenomenon even high rainy seasons can cause additional deformation in the dumped rockfills. Unfortunately these
displacements are not taken into account in the conventional numerical models which are currently used to predict embankment
dam behavior during impounding. In this paper to estimate these displacements, strain hardening-strain softening model in Flac
is modified based on the laboratory tests, in which same impounding process in such dams is considered. Main feature of the
model is reproduction of nonlinear behavior of rockfill material via mobilized shear strength parameters and using collapse
coefficient to display induced settlement due to inundation. This mobilization of shear strength parameters associated with some
functions for dilatancy behavior of rockfill are used in a finite difference code for both dry and wet condition of material. Collapse
coefficient is defined as a stress dependent function to show stress release in the material owing to saturation. To demonstrate
how the model works, simulation of some large scale triaxial tests of rockfill material in Gotvand embankment dam is presented
and results are compared with those from laboratory tests, which are in good agreement. The technique could be used with any
suitable constitutive law in other coarse-grained material to identify collapse settlements due to saturation

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The objective of this work is to perform a direct numerical simulation of turbulent channel flow where all essential scales of

motion are resolved due to variable time-stepping algorithm in various time advancement method and different discritized form

of convection term. A pseudo spectral method (Fourier series in stream-wise and span-wise directions and Chebychev polynomial

expansion in normal direction) is employed for the spatial derivatives. The time advancement is carried out by different semiimplicit

and splitting schemes. Also Alternating and Linearized forms are added to four commonly used forms of the convective

term, referred to as divergence, Convection, skew-symmetric, and rotational. Spectral method based on the primitive variable

formulation is used in Cartesian coordinates with two periodic and one non-periodic boundary condition in three dimensional

directions &Omega=[0,4&pi]×[-1,1]×[0,2&pi]. The friction Reynolds number for channel flow is set to be Re&tau=175 and the computational

grids of 128×65×128 are used in the x, y and z directions, respectively. The comparison is made between turbulent quantities

such as the turbulent statistics, wall shear velocity, standard deviation of u and total normalized energy of instantaneous velocities

in different time-discretization methods and different forms of nonlinear term. The present results show that third-order timediscretizations

forward Euler for explicit terms and backward Euler for implicit terms can minimize the computational cost of

integration by maximizing the time step, while keeping the CFL number near a threshold in time-discretization schemes. Also, the

de-aliased results of turbulence statistics do indicate that different expressions of nonlinear terms have minor discrepancy in

pseudo spectral method. The results show that the most desirable approach is a combination of variable time stepping third order

backward difference algorithm and rotational form, which provides reduced cost and further accuracy improvements.

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The nonlinear static procedures (NSPs) proposed by design codes do not lead to reliable results especially for tall buildings.

They generally provide inconsistent estimates of inelastic seismic demands, especially for the top floors due to their inabilities in

considering the higher modes effects. In this paper, a new enhanced pushover procedure is proposed which is based on the

envelope of the structural responses resulting from two separate pushover analyses as a combination rule. Also, the suggested

pushover analyses are performed using a newly proposed modal load pattern, i.e., the Modal Spectra Combination (MSC), and

the ASCE41-06 required first mode load pattern. The MSC load pattern is consisted of a number of mode shapes combined with

appropriate weighting factors that depend on their modal participation factors, modal frequencies and design spectral values. A

number of 2-D steel moment resisting frame models with different number of stories are used to investigate the efficiency of the

proposed method. The inter-story drifts and the maximum plastic beam moment and curvature responses are used as a measure

to compare the results obtained from the nonlinear time-history analyses (NL-THA) and some other NSPs. The results obtained

through rigorous nonlinear dynamic analyses show that the application of the proposed method leads to acceptable results for

steel MRF systems in comparison to other available enhanced NSPs. The OpenSees program is used for numerical analysis.

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The present paper focuses on size optimization of scallop domes subjected to static loading. As this type of space structures includes a large number of the structural elements, optimum design of such structures results in efficient structural configurations. In this paper, an efficient optimization algorithm is proposed by hybridizing particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and cellular automata (CA) computational strategy, denoted as enhanced particle swarm optimization (EPSO) algorithm. In the EPSO, the particles are distributed on a small dimensioned grid and the artificial evolution is evolved by a new velocity updating equation. In the new equation, the difference between the design variable vector of each site and an average vector of its neighboring sites is added to the basic velocity updating equation. This new term decreases the probability of premature convergence and therefore increases the chance of finding the global optimum or near global optima. The optimization task is achieved by taking into account linear and nonlinear responses of the structure. In the optimization process considering nonlinear behaviour, the geometrical and material nonlinearity effects are included. The numerical results demonstrate that the optimization process considering nonlinear behaviour results in more efficient structures compared with the optimization process considering linear behaviour. .

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The seismic behavior of frame bridges is generally evaluated using nonlinear static analysis with different plasticity models hence this paper tends to focus on the effectiveness of the two most common nonlinear modeling approaches comprising of concentrated and distributed plasticity models. A three-span prestressed concrete frame bridge in Tehran, Iran, including a pair of independent parallel bridge structures was selected as the model of the study. The parallel bridges were composed of identical decks with the total length of 215 meters supported on different regular and irregular substructures with non-prismatic piers. To calibrate the analytical modeling, a large-scale experimental and analytical seismic study on a two-span reinforced concrete bridge system carried out at the University of Nevada Reno was used. The comparison of the results shows the accuracy of analytical studies. In addition, close correlation between results obtained from two nonlinear modeling methods depicts that the lumped plasticity approach can be decisively considered as the useful tool for the nonlinear modeling of non-prismatic bridge piers with hollow sections due to its simple modeling assumption and less computational time.

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In this paper, a new approach is presented for estimating the vertical and horizontal distribution of undertow in the surf zone for reflective beaches. The present model is a modification of the original model presented by Okayasu et al., (1990) for natural, non-reflective beaches to include the effect of partially reflected waves. The nonlinearity of waves, wave-current interaction and nonlinear mass drift of the incident wave are also included in the present model. The results of experimental investigation and model development show that existence of reflective conditions on beaches results in a reduction in the magnitude of undertow and modifies its distribution across the beach profile. Comparison of the results by those obtained from the experiments clearly indicates that by taking the nonlinearity and wave-current interaction, the predictions of undertow in the surf zone are much improved. In particular, due to the effect of turbulence induced by wave breaking for nonlinear waves, the predicted results show more consistence with the measurements.

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An approach was formulated for the nonlinear analysis of three-dimensional dynamic soil-structure interaction (SSI) of asymmetric buildings in time domain in order to evaluate the seismic response behavior of torsionally coupled wall-type buildings. The asymmetric building was idealized as a single-storey three-dimensional system resting on different soil conditions. The soil beneath the superstructure was modeled as nonlinear solid element. As the stiffness of the reinforced concrete flexural wall is a strength dependent parameter, a method for strength distribution among the lateral force resisting elements was considered. The response of soil-structure interaction of the system under the lateral component of El Centro 1940 earthquake record was evaluated and the effect of base flexibility on the response behavior of the system was verified. The results indicated that the base flexibility decreased the torsional response of asymmetric building so that this effect for soft soil was maximum. On the other hand, the torsional effects can be minimized by using a strength distribution, when the centre of both strength CV and rigidity CR is located on the opposite side of the centre of mass CM, and SSI has no effect on this criterion.

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In the present study, the application of Endurance Time Analysis (ETA) method is investigated on seismic analysis of a high arch dam. In this method the coupled system is excited using the predesigned intensifying acceleration functions instead of the real ground motions. Finite element model of an arch dam considering the dam-rock-water interaction effects was developed in which the concrete and rock were assumed to have linear elastic behavior. The effect of the large displacement in dam body was considered in numerical model using co-rotational approach. The coupled system was analyzed by conventional Time History Analysis (THA) method in various seismic performance levels and the results were compared with those obtained from ETA at the equivalent target time. It was found that ETA method provides the close results to THA with acceptable accuracy while it reduces the total time of the analyses considerably.

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This study focuses on non-linear seismic response of a concrete gravity dam subjected to translational and rotational correlated components of ground motions including dam-reservoir interaction. For this purpose rotational components of ground motion is generated using Hong Non Lee improved method based on corresponding available translational components. The 2D seismic behavior of the dam concrete is taken into account using nonlinear fracture mechanics based on the smeared- crack concepts and the dam-reservoir system are modeled using Lagrangian-Lagrangian approach in finite element method. Based on presented formulation, Pine Flat concrete gravity dam is analyzed for different cases and results show that the rotational component of ground motion can increase or decrease the maximum horizontal and vertical displacements of dam crest. These results are dependent on the frequency of dam-reservoir system and predominant frequencies of translational and rotational components of ground motion.

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Latticed columns are frequently used in industrial steel structures. In some countries these built-up columns might be even used in other types of steel structures such as residential and commercial buildings. Besides, latticed columns are parts of skeletons of many historic buildings all around the world. To analyze a steel structure with latticed columns a more accurate numerical model for such a column seems to be essential. The lay-out and connectivity of constructing main profiles of a latticed column leads to formation of many shear zones along the length of a column. Therefore, considering shear effects on the behavior of a lattice column is inevitable. This paper proposed a new super-element with twelve degrees of freedom to be used in finite element modeling of latticed columns. The cross sectional area, moments of inertia, shear coefficient and torsional rigidity of the developed new element are derived. To compute these parameters with less complexity a model using only beam elements is also introduced. A general purpose finite element program named LaCE is developed. This FE program is capable of performing linear and nonlinear analysis of 3D-frames with latticed columns, considering shear deformation. To show the accuracy of the proposed element, several cases are studied. The outcome of these investigations revealed that the current-in-practice model for latticed columns suffers from some major shortcomings which to some extends are resolved by the proposed super-element. The developed element showed the capability of modeling a lattice column with good accuracy and less computational cost.

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The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of vierendeel panel width and vertical truss spacing ratio in an inelastic behavior of the STF system due to earthquake loads. The STF system is applied to a six-storey building that serves as apartments [2]. The STF system is used in the building in the transverse direction (N-S direction), while in the longitudinal direction (W-E direction) the building system uses the special moment resisting frame. The structural behavior was evaluated using nonlinear pushover and time history analyses. The results showed that by increasing the ratio of vierendeel panel width and vertical truss spacing, the ductility of the structure was increased. Based on the performance evaluation, the ratio of the vierendeel panel width and vertical truss spacing on the STF buildings that provided satisfactory performance was more or equal to 1.6. The ultimate drift obtained from non-linear time history analysis was smaller than the pushover analysis. This result showed that the static nonlinear pushover analysis was quite conservative in predicting the behavior of the six-storey building in an inelastic condition.

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The current building codes provide limited prescriptive guidance on design for protection of buildings due to progressive collapse. Progressive collapse is a situation in which a localized failure in a structure, caused by an abnormal load, such as explosions or other happenings. Three procedures, often employed for determination of the structural response during progressive collapse i.e. linear static procedure (LSP), nonlinear static (NSP) and nonlinear dynamic (NDP) analyses. In nonlinear static analysis, a force-based method is applied and the structure is pushed down to the target force. In this research, a new displacement-based method will be proposed for nonlinear static analysis. In displacement-based method, the structure is pushed down to target displacement instead of target force (similar to the one in seismic pushover analysis). To make a nonlinear static analysis, instead of increasing the load around the area of the removed column, a maximum displacement is calculated and the upper node of the removed column is pushed up to target displacement. Here, to determine the target displacement, results from nonlinear dynamic and linear static analyses are compared. This paper tries to present a formula to calculate the target displacement using the linear static rather than the nonlinear dynamic analysis. For this reason, 3 buildings with 3, 5 and 10 stories have been seismically designed and studied. The results show that, this method is much more accurate in comparison to the recommended approach in current codes. Also, this method does not have the limitations of force-based nonlinear static analysis.