Optimum Location And Bracing System As Alternative To Shear Walls For Retrofitting Of RC Buildings Against Seismic Loading

The defective structures must be retrofitted to resist the effects of earthquakes due to the potential risks connected with reinforced concrete structures designed in many parts of the world in accordance with codes that are now proven to guarantee insufficient safety against seismic loads. Typically, shear walls or steel bracing are utilized to boost the seismic strength of framed structures. This paper discusses the possibility of using braces in two different conditions, the first one is in retrofitting already constructed structures that don’t have sufficient strength against seismic loading, and the second one is the possibility of using braces instead of shear walls in designing non constructed reinforced concrete structures for economical purposes. Different bracing systems in different locations compared with reinforced concrete shear walls in affecting the structural properties of the 10-story square building. Using bracing in the interior frames of buildings was also considered. The results show that different bracing systems have different responses for structural properties such as story displacement, base shear and fundamental time period. The results are significant for detecting the best bracing system to use instead of shear walls reflecting for the two mentioned scenarios as well as considering their locations on the building

Static Shape and Stress Control of Trusses with Optimum Time, Actuators and Actuation

Traditional shape and stress control of structures use many actuators and require enormous time to find reasonable solutions that need designers to input specific target displacement and stress. This study employs a linear technique to static shape and stress control of pin-jointed assemblies as a theoretical advancement to prior works and provides a comparative analysis against previously established works. The study evaluates the proposed method using MATLAB to find the optimum set of actuators, and MATLAB and SAP2000 to verify the actuation results obtained through applying the set of actuations to the numerical models. The proposed method minimizes the number of trials, count of actuators, and total actuation up to 83%, 73%, and 50%, respectively. Furthermore, the optimum solution could be found in a single trial. The study focuses on the three aspects: (a) finding the optimal count of actuators; (b) optimum amount of actuation using fmincon function; and c) Implementing two-sided inequalities to control equations allowing designers to develop target internal forces and nodal displacements, as domains rather than specific numbers. This improves the optimization process affecting actuator count, total actuation elements, and processing time