Performance-based seismic design of flexible-base multi-storey buildings considering soil–structure interaction

A comprehensive parametric study has been carried out to investigate the seismic performance of multi-storey shear buildings considering soil–structure interaction (SSI). More than 40,000 SDOF and MDOF models are designed based on different lateral seismic load patterns and target ductility demands to represent a wide range of building structures constructed on shallow foundations. The cone model is adopted to simulate the dynamic behaviour of an elastic homogeneous soil half-space. 1, 5, 10, 15 and 20-storey SSI systems are subjected to three sets of synthetic spectrum-compatible earthquakes corresponding to different soil classes, and the effects of soil stiffness, design lateral load pattern, fundamental period, number of storeys, structure slenderness ratio and site condition are investigated. The results indicate that, in general, SSI can reduce (up to 60%) the strength and ductility demands of multi-storey buildings, especially those with small slenderness ratio and low ductility demands. It is shown that code-specified design lateral load patterns are more suitable for long period flexible-base structures; whereas a trapezoidal design lateral-load pattern can provide the best solution for short period flexible-base structures. Based on the results of this study, a new design factor RF is introduced which is able to capture the reduction of strength of single-degree-of-freedom structures due to the combination of SSI and structural yielding. To take into account multi-degree-of-freedom effects in SSI systems, a new site and interaction-dependent modification factor RM is also proposed. The RF and RM factors are integrated into a novel performance-based design method for site and interaction-dependent seismic design of flexible-base structures. The adequacy of the proposed method is demonstrated through several practical design examples

Seismic behaviour of deficient RC frames strengthened with CFRP composites

A full-scale two-storey RC building with poor detailing in the beam–column joints was tested on a shake table as part of the European research project ECOLEADER. After the initial tests which damaged the structure, the frame was strengthened using carbon fibre reinforced materials (CFRPs) and re-tested. This paper investigates analytically the efficiency of the strengthening technique at improving the seismic behaviour of this frame structure. The experimental data from the initial shake table tests are used to calibrate analytical models. To simulate deficient beam–column joints, models of steel–concrete bond-slip and bond-strength degradation under cyclic loading are considered. The analytical models are used to assess the efficiency of the CFRP rehabilitation using a set of medium to strong seismic records. The CFRP strengthening intervention enhanced the behaviour of the substandard beam–column joints, and resulted in substantial improvement of the seismic performance of the damaged RC frame. It is shown that, after the CFRP intervention, the damaged building would experience on average 65% less global damage compared to the original structure if it was subjected to real earthquake excitations

Seismic performance of cold-formed steel bolted moment connections with bolting friction-slip mechanism

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Typical cold-formed steel (CFS) moment-resisting connections generally have relatively low ductility and energy dissipation capacity as a result of low local/distortional buckling resistance of thin-walled CFS elements, and therefore, may not be suitable for seismic applications. To address this issue, a comprehensive analytical study is presented on the seismic performance of CFS bolted beam-to-column connections with fiction-slip mechanism aiming to obtain more efficient design solutions suitable for CFS frames in seismic regions. Experimentally validated finite element (FE) models in ABAQUS are used to predict the hysteretic behaviour and failure of a range of CFS connections by taking into account the characteristics of the bolting system as well as nonlinear material properties and geometrical imperfections. The developed models are then used to investigate the effects of CFS beam cross-sectional shape and classification, bolt configuration, and slip resistance on the seismic performance of the connections. It is shown that using bolting friction-slip mechanism can significantly increase (up to 200%) the ductility, energy dissipation capacity and damping coefficient of the connections especially for CFS beams with thinner plates (class 3 and 4). Based on the results, the best design configurations are identified to improve the cyclic response of the CFS connections under strong earthquakes. While conventional bolted moment connections with class 3 and 4 beam cross-sections generally do not satisfy the AISC requirements for intermediate and special moment frames, it is shown that optimum designed connections with bolting friction-slip mechanism can be efficiently used in high seismic regions

Estimation of inelastic displacement demands of flexible-based structures on soft soils

This study aims to develop efficient tools for performance-based seismic design of soil-structure interaction (SSI) systems on soft soils. To simulate the SSI effects, linear and nonlinear 'equivalent fixed-base single-degree-of-freedom' (EFSDOF) oscillators as well as a sway-rocking SSI model were adopted. The nonlinear dynamic response of around 10,000 SSI models and EFSDOF oscillators having a wide range of fundamental periods, target ductility demands, and damping ratios were obtained under a total of 20 seismic records on soft soil sites. Based on the results of this study, a practical method is developed for estimating the base shear and maximum displacement demands of a nonlinear single-degree-of-freedom structure on soft soil deposits. In the proposed procedure, the effect of frequency content of ground motions is considered by normalising the period of vibration by the spectral predominant periods, while the nonlinear EFSDOF models are used to improve the computational efficiency

Design optimisation for cold rolled steel beam sections with complex stiffeners considering cold working effects

This paper presents the analysis and design optimization of the cold rolled steel sections for flexural strength considering the effect of cold working exerted on the section during the roll forming process. The sections included channel and zed shapes with complex longitudinal web and flange stiffeners. Nonlinear Finite Element (FE) modelling was developed to model the flexural strength of the channel and zed beams and validated against the four-point bending experiments for these sections. The material properties of steel at the section’s flat parts, corners, and stiffener bends were obtained from tensile tests and were incorporated into the FE simulations to account for the true material properties at these regions. The section strength was then optimized using FE modelling results based on the Design of Experiments (DOE) and response surface methodology. Optimal designs for the channel and zed sections with maximum strength in distortional buckling could be obtained while changing the stiffeners’ position, shape, sizes, and considering material properties at section corners and stiffener bends. It revealed that, the optimal designs provided up to 13% and 17% increase in flexural strength for the channel and zed sections, respectively; however, when the true material properties at the section corner and the stiffener’s bend regions was included, the increase in flexural strength increased up to 20% and 23%, respectively

Fast and scalable inference of multi-sample cancer lineages.

Somatic variants can be used as lineage markers for the phylogenetic reconstruction of cancer evolution. Since somatic phylogenetics is complicated by sample heterogeneity, novel specialized tree-building methods are required for cancer phylogeny reconstruction. We present LICHeE (Lineage Inference for Cancer Heterogeneity and Evolution), a novel method that automates the phylogenetic inference of cancer progression from multiple somatic samples. LICHeE uses variant allele frequencies of somatic single nucleotide variants obtained by deep sequencing to reconstruct multi-sample cell lineage trees and infer the subclonal composition of the samples. LICHeE is open source and available at http://viq854.github.io/lichee

Shape optimization of cold-formed steel beam-columns with practical and manufacturing constraints

Peer reviewedPostprin

Mirroring co-evolving trees in the light of their topologies

Determining the interaction partners among protein/domain families poses hard computational problems, in particular in the presence of paralogous proteins. Available approaches aim to identify interaction partners among protein/domain families through maximizing the similarity between trimmed versions of their phylogenetic trees. Since maximization of any natural similarity score is computationally difficult, many approaches employ heuristics to maximize the distance matrices corresponding to the tree topologies in question. In this paper we devise an efficient deterministic algorithm which directly maximizes the similarity between two leaf labeled trees with edge lengths, obtaining a score-optimal alignment of the two trees in question. Our algorithm is significantly faster than those methods based on distance matrix comparison: 1 minute on a single processor vs. 730 hours on a supercomputer. Furthermore we have advantages over the current state-of-the-art heuristic search approach in terms of precision as well as a recently suggested overall performance measure for mirrortree approaches, while incurring only acceptable losses in recall. A C implementation of the method demonstrated in this paper is available at http://compbio.cs.sfu.ca/mirrort.htmComment: 13 pages, 2 figures, Iman Hajirasouliha and Alexander Sch\"onhuth are joint first author

Strength and deflection behaviour of cold-formed steel back-to-back channels

© 2018 Cold-formed steel (CFS) construction can lead to more efficient designs compared to hot-rolled steel members as a consequence of its high strength, light weight, ease of fabrication, and flexibility in their cross-section profiles. However, CFS members are vulnerable to local, distortional and overall buckling modes. This paper develops a numerical model to investigate the flexural strength and failure modes of CFS back-to-back channel beams and verifies the efficiency of an optimisation framework previously proposed. The model incorporates non-linear stress-strain behaviour and enhanced corner properties obtained from coupon tests, as well as initial geometric imperfections measured in physical specimens. To simulate the behaviour of a bolt bearing against a steel plate in the back-to-back section, a connector model is used that takes into account both slippage and bearing deformations. The developed Finite Element (FE) models are verified against six four-point bending tests on CFS back-to-back channel beams, where excellent agreement is found between the experimental results and the FE predictions. The validated FE models are then used to assess the adequacy of the effective width method in EC3 and the Direct Strength Method (DSM) in estimating the design capacity of conventional and optimum design CFS channel beam sections. The results indicate that both EC3 and DSM provide accurate predictions for the bending capacity of lipped channel beam sections. A comparison between FE predictions and tested results show that, the geometric imperfections can change the FE predictions of ultimate capacity by 7%, while the strain-hardening of CFS material at the round corners has negligible effects. It is also shown that EC3 uses a reduced cross-sectional property to calculate deflections, which can reasonably predict deflections with a slight overestimation (6%) at the serviceability load level

Experimental investigation of local-flexural interactive buckling of cold-formed steel channel columns

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive experimental programme aimed at studying the interaction of local and overall flexural buckling in cold-formed steel (CFS) plain and lipped channels under axial compression. The results were further used to verify the accuracy of the current design procedures in Eurocode 3, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of a previously proposed optimisation methodology. A total of 36 axial compression tests on CFS channels with three different lengths (1 m, 1.5 m and 2 m) and four different cross-sections were conducted under a concentrically applied load and pin-ended boundary conditions. The initial geometric imperfections of the specimens were measured using a specially designed set-up with laser displacement transducers. Material tests were also carried out to determine the tensile properties of the flat parts of the cross-sections, as well as the cold-worked corner regions. A comparison between the experimental results and the Eurocode 3 predictions showed that the effective width approach combined with the P–M interaction equation proposed in Eurocode 3 to take into account the shift of the effective centroid consistently provided safe results. However, the Eurocode 3 procedures were also quite conservative in predicting the capacity pertaining to local-global interaction buckling, especially for plain channels. Furthermore, the experimental data confirmed the results of an optimisation study and demonstrated that the optimised CFS columns exhibited a capacity which was up to 26% higher than the standard channel with the same amount of material taken as a starting point