ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS BASED EQUIPMENT SELECTION METHOD FOR CONSTRUCTION PROJECT USING MATLAB TOOL

Equipment selection is a key factor in modern construction industry. As it is a complex factor, current models offered by literatures fail to provide adequate solutions for major issues like systematic evaluation of soft factors and weighting of soft benefits in comparison with costs. This paper aims at making a comparative study between GA and AHP by utilising MATLAB as a tool. It is a convenient tool offering an orderly methodical thinking. It guides them in making consistent decisions and provides a facility for all necessary computation

A New Procedure for Damage Assessment of Prestressed Concrete Beams Using Artificial Neural Network

A damage assessment procedure has been developed using artificial neural network (ANN) for prestressed concrete beams. The methodology had been formulated using the results obtained from an experimental study conducted in the laboratory. Prestressed concrete (PSC) rectangular beams were cast, and pitting corrosion was introduced in the prestressing wires and was allowed to be snapped using accelerated corrosion process. Both static and dynamic tests were conducted to study the behaviour of perfect and damaged beams. The measured output from both static and dynamic tests was taken as input to train the neural network. Back propagation network was chosen for this purpose, which was written using the programming package MATLAB. The trained network was tested using separate test data obtained from the tests. A damage assessment procedure was developed using the trained network, it was validated using the data available in literature, and the outcome is presented in this paper

Compressive Strength of HPC Column with Non–Metallic Reinforcement

Non–metallic reinforcement is of recent origin to eliminate the corrosion problems in concrete structures and is having very good qualities, which are required to tailor the need of anti corrosive reinforcement. Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) rebars comes under this category and its structural properties makes it to use for variety of applications. Hence, an attempt is made to find the suitability of GFRP rebar as reinforcement for compression members. This paper aims to investigate the possibilities of identifying suitable alternate reinforcement to steel and compare their performance in terms of load carrying capacity. M60 grade of concrete was chosen for the study and the cross section of the compression member chosen is square. The slenderness ratios of 6 and 8 were adopted and the end conditions are pinned. A critical analysis is made with experimental investigations. It is concluded that the load carrying capacity of GFRP reinforced column is 56% and 40% more compared to steel reinforced column for slenderness ratios of 6 and 8 respectively

Load deformation characteristics of GFRP reinforced HPC square columns

Performance of glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) reinforced high performance concrete compression members under axial loading were studied by conducting detailed experimental investigations. For the present study, twenty-four square columns of size 150 mm and slenderness ratios of 6, 8, 10 and 12 were cast, in which twelve columns reinforced with GFRP and the remaining twelve with conventional steel.  For each slenderness ratio, three different percentages of reinforcement was tried with 1.4%, 2% and 3.5% each as longitudinal reinforcement for both GFRP and steel. Performance characteristics such as load carrying capacity, axial deformation, lateral deformation and rebar axial strain were studied in detail. Parametric study was done taking L/D ratio and percentage of reinforcement as parameters. Keywords: Load carrying capacity, axial deformation, lateral deformation, rebar axial strain, L/D ratio, Glass Fiber Reinforced Polyme

Seismic performance evaluation methodologies for civil engineering structures

220-228There is a strong need for evaluating the adequacy of seismic performance of civil engineering structures following the damage and collapse of numerous structures during recent earthquakes. In addition, the adequacy of seismic performance of the older structures in regions of high seismicity, which are designed prior to the advent of revised seismic deign codes, is also a matter of growing concern. Seismic performance evaluation of civil engineering structures is an iterative process involving alternate stages of experimentation and computation. Several experimental methodologies including quasi-static testing, effective force testing, shake table testing, pseudo dynamic testing and real time dynamic hybrid testing and computational methodologies based on different numerical time stepping procedures are used to simulate and evaluate the seismic performance of civil engineering structures. In this paper a broad overview on the existing computational and experimental seismic performance evaluation methodologies is reported. The paper also presents the genesis, development and mathematical formulation of the pseudo dynamic testing method in detail and highlights the merits and demerits of the method over the other experimental seismic performance evaluation method