Sharif Digital Repository

Concrete dams are one of the most important infrastructures in any country. In recent years new safety standards, such as the analysis of concrete dams in various modes of potential failure or performance-based design are proposed. Many of existing dams may fail to meet revised safety criteria. For this reason it is necessary to control built dams with this new standards. In this reseach, fragility assessment is used for rational safety evalution and decision-making. fragility curves are defined by the probability of a structural limit. We examined the fragility curves for the nonlinear behavior and safety of the dam under earthquakes. fragility curves based on the cracking area are more... 

Supplying water has almost always been the essential need of human for agricultural, industrial and drinking water use. One of the infrastructure works to catch up to this goal is dam construction. Among all of dams, concrete gravity dams have been fortunate between designers and builders of dams, because of their acceptable function against seismic loads. So, analyzing the function and stability of dams is important in different cases. Formed crack in dam body is one of the most important parameters that affects both the function and durability of a concrete gravity dam and considering the measure of the earthquake effects on the formation and expansion of crack profiles many studies have... 

A high percentage of reinforced concrete buildings are not earthquake resistant because they are often designed based on old regulations, which do not satisfy the requirements of new earthquake codes. Construction weaknesses make buildings more vulnerable, and thus, different approaches are needed to strengthen structures to resist lateral forces. 3D Panel system brings together the best qualities of in-situ and precast systems and improves their shortcoming. It includes the advantages of precast systems, such as having relatively low labor costs, less waste material and machinery, reducing implementation time and improving quality control. At the same time, serious problems related to... 

Supplying water has almost always been the essential need of human for agricultural, industrial and drinking water use. One of the infrastructure works to catch up to this goal is dam construction. Among all of dams, concrete gravity dams have been fortunate between designers and builders of dams, because of their acceptable function against seismic loads. So, analyzing the function and stability of dams is important in different cases. Formed crack in dam body is one of the most important parameters that affect both the function and durability of a concrete gravity dam and considering the measure of the earthquake affects on the formation and expansion of crack profiles many studies have... 

Concrete dams are important nations infra structures. They store water for different purposes such as irrigation, water supply, flood control, electric power, recreation and improvement of navigation. Safety of concrete dams is a major challenge for the owners. As a result, concrete dam’s behavior when subjected to different load condition especially an earthquake ground motion is a concern which may cause some damage. It is needed to determine concrete gravity dam’s response under different load condition. One of the important factors for determining concrete dam’s response is foundation properties and its behavior under seismic loading. A finite element model consisting of... 

In the current design Codes, the estimation of maximum inelastic Single Degree Of Freedom (SDOF) displacements is done through simplified procedures by either applying modification factors on maximum SDOF elastic displacement demands or by considering equivalent SDOF systems with elongated fundamental period and increased damping ratio. Thus, the inherent uncertainty caused by approximating maximum inelastic displacements with maximum elastic displacements is neglected. On the other hand, in time history dynamic analysis of structures, the free field recorded ground motions are applied to the base of structures. Obviously, this procedure would be correct when the structure is built on firm... 

The primary goal of seismic design requirements of building codes is to protect life safety of occupants during severe earthquakes. Thus it is required that collapse probability of designed buildings to be acceptably low. However current design codes are strength based and intrinsically experimental. Thus collapse safety of buildings designed by these codes is not known quantitatively. The history of formation and update of seismic building codes is marked by big earthquakes; often serving as landmarks for the evolution of seismic codes and detecting its deficiencies. As time passes, the design criteria become more and more articulate and ambitious, just as the design objectives evolve from... 

General strategies for seismic design of structure include increasing the rigidity and strength, increasing the energy absorption capacity by implementing energy dissipating devices and reducing the seismic demand by isolating the structure from its base. Isolation system provides the required ductility of the structural system by concentrating its displacements mainly on the isolator level, and separates the structure from the horizontal components of the ground motion. That would create a system whose its main frequency is much lower than the dominant frequency of the earthquake records and the natural frequency of the equivalent fixed-base structure. Because of growing tendency towards... 

Nonlinear dynamic procedure (NDP) can in general provide more realistic results than nonlinear static procedures (NSPs). That is due to consideration of higher modes effects and the shifts in inertia load patterns as the structural system experiences nonlinear behavior. Therefore, the simplified NSPs based on constant load patterns are inadequate to determine the inelastic seismic demands especially for top stories of tall buildings. The conventional procedures that have been implemented in design codes and guidelines such as ATC-40, FEMA356, FEMA440 and ASCE41-06, apply invariant load patterns such as inverse triangular, equal lateral force (ELF), first mode shape, uniform and SRSS modal... 

In this thesis, in order to evaluate the vulnerability of concrete structures equipped with Yielding Element (YE) against earthquakes, two single story/ span concrete frames with different bay-to-height ratios (B/H<1 and B/H>1) are considered. Since the nature of earthquakes is to release energy due to tectonic movements in the earth and the nature of damages in structures depends on the rate of absorbed energy, investigating the behavior of structures are based on the energy concept which is considered as the most important way to design structures against earthquake load. In order to provide seismic resistance against earthquakes and reduce the damages in main elements, it is required to... 

Determining nonlinear dynamic behavior of structures is always one of the main goals of structure and earthquake engineers. The Modal Incremental Dynamic Analysis (MIDA) is one of the newest methods for analyzing the seismic behavior of structures. Indeed, this method has superseded the exact IDA method which is too complicated and prolix. Although, this method represents approximate results, high accuracy, fastness and low cost procedure made it an efficient and useful technique. Many researchers have used this method and investigated the accuracy of that and achieved proper results. Up to now no one has applied this method on structures which are equipped with dampers. In the procedure of... 

Recent studies in the area of damage assessment of structures under severe earthquakes have shown that plan asymmetry of structures have considerable effects on the severity of the induced damages. In these cases, structure enters into its nonlinear behaviour, and both structural and nonstructural elements sustain large forces and deformations. Nowadays, due to the complication of nonlinear dynamic analyses in estimating these forces and deformations in case of seismic ground motion, the use of nonlinear static analysis methods has increased. These procedures expose the structures to monotonically increasing lateral forces with an invariant height-wise distribution until a predetermined... 

The on grade flexible steel storage tanks are extensively used in oil refineries, petrochemical plants, power plants and many other municipal utilities. The increasing statistics of various incidents and attacks occurred to these facilities clearly indicates the vulnerability of these strategic installations under the effects of intentional (terrorist) blasts. Therefore, Given the strategic nature of the care and maintenance for these tanks, their damage assessment under the prescribed explosion is quite important. Due to flammable content of some of these tanks, it is necessary to speed up the process of their vulnerability assessment and making the appropriate decisions for any needed... 

Application of Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) as a means for vibration suppression of structural systems has extensively been explored in recent years. Recovering the applied residual strain upon unloading (super-elasticity) or by heating (shape memory effect) at different temperature ranges are two inherent features of SMA materials that have gained most attention. In this work, the seismic behavior of a proposed beam-column semi-rigid end-plate connection that has been equipped with both steel and SMA studs in austenite phase is investigated. A number of 3-D steel MRF structural models with 6,9 and 12 number of stories are considered. These structural models are subjected to bi-directional... 

Progressive collapse occurs when the loading path of a structure is changed so that the other structural elements loaded beyond their capacity and fail. Generally, structural progressive collapse is categorized in different types based on the failure progress mechanism. Most dramatic progressive collapse occurred in 1968 at the Ronan Point residential apartment through an internal gas explosion. The type of progressive collapse of the aforementioned building was the Pancake collapse. Widespread efforts have been put to introduce a simplified static procedure to simulate the removal column phenomenon as in the Pancake collapse, which is a dynamic event involving vibration of building... 

Nowadays, base isolation technique is widely used in the old and new structures, so it is necessary to assess the seismic performance of base-isolated buildings probabilistically, it is also essential to assess their performance during near-source versus far-field earthquakes.
Developing the fragility curves is useful probabilistic method for the seismic assessment of structures. These curves define the probability of exceedance of different damage states for a given level of seismic intensity parameter. Former investigations has been done to assess the seismic behavior of base isolation systems consider base isolated highway bridge piers.
In this thesis fragility curves are derived...