In last decades many strategies for seismic vulnerability mitigation of structures have been studied and experimented; in particular energy dissipation by external devices assumes a great importance for the relative simplicity and efficacy. Among all possible approaches the use of fluid viscous dampers are very interesting, because of their velocity-dependent behaviour and relatively low costs....

Response modification factors (R-factor) are used in current seismic building codes to reduce earthquake forces associated with seismic design level to determine force levels. In recent years, many authors have shown great interest in the development of seismic structural systems and several theoretical and experimental studies have been conducted to investigate performance of dampers but littl...

The influence of the near-fault ground motion on the response of long-span bridges must be considered as a critical factor for seismic design because the response indicates different aspects from existing earthquake characteristics. Also, it is important to note that the safety index for the risk assessment of long-span bridges is determined based on the minimum expected lifecycle cost E(LCC). ...

This paper presents the application of the harmony search based algorithm to the optimum detailed design of special seismic moment reinforced concrete (RC) frames under earthquake loads based on American Standard specifications. The objective function is selected as the total cost of the frame which includes the cost of concrete, formwork and reinforcing steel for individual members of the fram...

This paper presents the application of the harmony search based algorithm to the optimum detailed design of special seismic moment reinforced concrete (RC) frames under earthquake loads based on American Standard specifications. The objective function is selected as the total cost of the frame which includes the cost of concrete, formwork and reinforcing steel for individual members of the fram...

Codes for design and constructions of pressure-vessel provide a number of loading conditions that have to be considered. Pressures are primary loadings that are applied either internally or externally over the surface of the vessels; applied forces act either at local points or throughout the mass of the vessel. Among applied loads, inertial forces due to ground motion can be relevant when indu...

Resonant metamaterials have been proposed to reflect or redirect elastic waves at different length scales, ranging from thermal vibrations to seismic excitation. However, for seismic excitation, where energy is mostly carried by surface waves, energy reflection and redirection might lead to harming surrounding regions. Here, we propose a seismic metabarrier able to convert seismic Rayleigh wave...

The paper presents a plastic analysis procedure based on the energy balance concept for performance based seismic retrofit of multi-story multi-bay masonry infilled reinforced concrete (R/C) frames with a ‘soft’ ground story using passive energy dissipation (PED) devices with the objective of achieving a target performance level of the retrofitted R/C frame for a given seismic hazard level at t...

This study developed a national seismic hazard map around Taiwan through a deterministic manner. The essential of this approach is to treat every historic event as a potential point source, then with the seismic hazard taken as the maximum ground motion resulted from the series of earthquake events. A program developed in-house was used to carry out mass computation and map-making. The results ...