For the past three years, students in ARCE 483 Seismic Analysis and Design in the Architectural Engineering program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo have been designing experiments using K’nex toys. The resulting experiments have included the effects of fixity on natural frequency, flexible versus rigid performance, seismic activity on a bridge structure, soft story behavior in buildings, the effect...

With the conceptual development of performance-based design, the earthquake engineering community has begun to recognize the importance of controlling both interstory drifts and absolute floor accelerations. However, these often present conflicting requirements for design. In this paper, we present a multi-objective genetic algorithm to address this conflict by identifying a Pareto front of opt...

A generic method for analysis of nonlinear forced response for bladed disks with friction dampers of different designs has been developed. The method uses explicit finite element modeling of dampers, which allows accurate description of flexibility and, for the first time, dynamic properties of dampers of different designs in multiharmonic analysis of bladed disks. Large-scale finite element da...

In this work, the behaviour of systems with three degrees of freedom is modelled for a fixed loss factor. The loss factor used in this work is 0.075. Four models are studied and the displacements as well as the energies stored in the systems are computed using the simulations. The governing equations are numerically solved using MATLAB. The dampers are varied in position and in numbers to deriv...