Regional seismic damage simulation of buildings provides decision-makers with important information for earthquake disaster prevention and mitigation. Utilizing nonlinear time history analysis using ...multiple-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) models for buildings, and the next-generation performance-based earthquake engineering, an open-source general-purpose scientific workflow for seismic damage simulation and loss prediction of urban buildings (referred to as SimCenter Workflow) is presented in this study. To introduce the SimCenter Workflow process in detail and demonstrate its advantages, a seismic damage simulation and loss prediction for 1.8 million buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area were performed using the SimCenter Workflow. The open nature and modularization of the SimCenter Workflow facilitate its extensibility and make it practical for researchers to apply to seismic damage simulations in other regions.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping building design processes to be smarter and automated. Considering the increasingly wide application of shear wall systems in high-rise buildings and envisioning ...the massive benefit of automated structural design, this paper proposes a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based shear wall design method, which learns from existing shear wall design documents and then performs structural design intelligently and swiftly. To this end, structural design datasets were prepared via abstraction, semanticization, classification, and parameterization in terms of building height and seismic design category. The GAN model improved its shear wall design proficiency through adversarial training supported by data and hyper-parametric analytics. The performance of the trained GAN model was appraised against the metrics based on the confusion matrix and the intersection-over-union approach. Finally, case studies were conducted to evaluate the applicability, effectiveness, and appropriateness of the innovative GAN-based structural design method, indicating significant speed-up and comparable quality.
•An generative adversarial network-based automated structural design framework.•An open-access datasets of structural design drawings.•The datasets pre-processing method via pioneering abstraction, semanticization, classification, and parameterization.•Model validation approach based on confusion matrix and intersection-over-union metrics.
Numerical simulation has increasingly become an effective method and powerful tool for performance-based earthquake engineering research. Amongst the existing research efforts, most numerical ...analyses were conducted using general-purpose commercial software, which to some extent limits in-depth investigations on specific topics with complicated nature. In consequence, this work develops a new shear wall element model and associated material constitutive models based on the open source finite element (FE) code OpenSees, in order to perform nonlinear seismic analyses of high-rise RC frame-core tube structures. A series of shear walls, a 141.8-m frame-core tube building and a super-tall building (the Shanghai Tower, with a height of 632m) are simulated. The rationality and reliability of the proposed element model and analysis method are validated through comparison with the available experimental data as well as the analytical results of a well validated commercial FE code. The research outcome will assist in providing a useful reference and an effective tool for further numerical analysis of the seismic behavior of tall and super-tall buildings.
•A new shear wall element model is proposed and implemented in OpenSees.•Shear wall element model is validated using published experimental data.•A modeling strategy is developed for simulating super-tall buildings using OpenSees.•Simulation of tall buildings is validated using well accepted commercial FE code.•A 42-story RC building model is accessible online to allow the work to be reproduced.
With the rapid development of remote sensing technology, satellite or aerial images from the disaster area become available within 24 hours after an earthquake. The collapsed buildings can be easily ...identified from these images. In this work, a framework for near real-time seismic loss estimation for regional buildings is proposed, which improves the accuracy of nonlinear time-history analysis (THA)-based loss estimations by taking advantage of the identified building collapse scene of the disaster area. Specifically, a series of THA are performed for the target regional buildings, thereby generating a number of simulation results. Those simulation results that bear strong similarities to the identified collapse scene are identified as the optimal solutions, which will be used to estimate the seismic loss. The simulation results of the case studies signify that the use of the identified building collapse scene leads to much closer estimations to actual economic losses.
An efficient vibration control can reduce negative effects induced by environmental vibrations and thereby improve the performance of precision instruments and the qualities of manufacture. The ...performance of the widely used linear quadratic regulator control algorithm, a classical active control methodology, depends on the parameters of the control algorithm. Consequently, a set of fixed parameters cannot satisfy the demand for controlling various types of environmental vibrations. Therefore, this study proposes a vibration identification method based on a convolutional neural network. This method helps to optimize the linear quadratic regulator algorithm by selecting corresponding optimal parameters according to the identification results, thereby achieving the objective of optimal control subjected to various types of vibration inputs. Specifically, environmental vibration signals are collected, and the preliminary features of the vibrations (i.e. wavelet coefficient matrices or images) are adopted as input samples for the convolutional neural network. A genetic algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of the linear quadratic regulator algorithm for each type of vibration; subsequently, the trained convolutional neural network model with the best performance is used to identify the vibration and select the corresponding optimal parameters of the linear quadratic regulator algorithm under different types of vibration inputs. Case studies show that the performance of the improved linear quadratic regulator control method is significantly better than that of the conventional linear quadratic regulator algorithm with fixed parameters.
Reinforced concrete (RC) frames are one of the most commonly used structural systems worldwide. Earthquake actions and progressive collapse caused by accidental local damage are two critical hazards ...increasing collapse risks of multi-story RC frames. A significant difference is well recognized between the structural seismic design and progressive collapse design. Whilst the seismic design focuses on resisting the lateral forces due to earthquake, the progressive collapse design deals with resisting the unbalanced vertical load induced by a localized failure. Existing research has revealed that considering the two different designs individually for a structure may lead to an undesirable overall structural performance and unnecessary waste of construction materials. In this study, a novel Multi-Hazard Resistant, Prefabricated Concrete (MHRPC) frame system is proposed to satisfy the demands of both structural seismic and progressive collapse designs. Cyclic and progressive collapse tests are conducted to validate the performance of this newly proposed structural system. The mechanisms of the MHRPC frame system under both cyclic loads and a middle column removal scenario are analyzed based on the experimental results and numerical simulations using OpenSees. The results indicate that the proposed fame system exhibits such characteristics as large rotation, low damage, self-centering, and ease of repair. The system is also proven to be able to meet the multi-hazard design requirements of RC frames against both earthquake actions and progressive collapse.
•A novel multi-hazard resistant prefabricated concrete frame system is proposed.•Multi-hazard resistance of three different frames is experimentally studied.•Effects of progressive collapse design on the seismic performance are evaluated.•Numerical method for simulating the new frame system is proposed.
•A simplified model is developed for the seismic analysis of a super-tall building.•The computational time is reduced by over 100 times with a reliable accuracy.•This model is used to compare two ...design schemes in terms of resilient performance.•The fully braced scheme enables rapid repair and re-occupancy after earthquakes.
Resilience-based earthquake design for next-generation super-tall buildings has become an important trend in earthquake engineering. Due to the complex structural system in super-tall buildings and the extreme computational workload produced when using refined finite element (FE) models to design such buildings, it is rather difficult to efficiently perform a comparison of different design schemes of super-tall buildings and to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of different designs. Here, a simplified nonlinear model is developed and applied to compare two design schemes (i.e., the fully braced scheme and half-braced scheme) of a super-tall mega-braced frame-core tube building, which is an actual engineering project with a total height of approximately 540m. The accuracy of the simplified model is validated through a comparison of the results of modal analyses, static analyses and dynamic time history analyses using the refined FE models. Subsequently, the plastic energy dissipation of different components and the distribution of the total plastic energy dissipation over the height of the two design schemes are compared using the proposed simplified model. The analyses indicate that the fully braced scheme is superior because of its more uniform energy distribution along the building height and the large amount of energy dissipated in the replaceable coupling beams, which enables rapid repair and re-occupancy after an earthquake. In contrast, the potential damage in the half-braced scheme is more concentrated and more severe, and the damage in the core tubes is difficult to repair after an earthquake.
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