A comparison study of numerical modeling approaches for simulating the in-plane seismic response of masonry walls: Comparing unreinforced masonry walls with masonry walls retrofitted with the bed-joint reinforcement technique

The extraction of natural gas in the northern part of the Netherlands, from the region of Groningen, has been causing human-induced seismic activities for the past several decades. This is a problem since the existing building stock in this region, which consists of mainly unreinforced masonry buildings and historical structures, are not...

Impact forces on bridge piers in the event of ship collisions

The aim of this thesis is to propose a simple technique to estimate the maximum impact forces acting on bridge piers in the event of ship collisions. This technique is determined for Dutch commercial inland waterway ships (CEMT classes) and set up to be applied by bridge engineers to determine the required bridge pier strength. Many collision...

Adjusting design models for pile caps and wall girders by using non-linear Finite Element Analysis

The strut-and-tie method is a reliable tool for designing the reinforcement in discontinuity regions in reinforced concrete structures. It provides safe designs, but it is on the other hand also acknowledged to provide conservative designs. As the strut-and-tie model is widely used in the design of structural elements as wall girders and pile...

A comparison between the SLaMA method and NLFEA for 2D and 3D analyses of masonry structure

Each year, the province of Groningen experiences many induced earthquakes due gas extraction, which has been ongoing since 1963. The earthquakes cause damage to the buildings situated in the Groningen area, and they constitute a potential danger for the safety of the residents. These buildings are typically unreinforced masonry structures which...

On the aeroelasticity of an extreme scale wind turbine: Using an FSI framework in NLR's in-house code ENSOLV

Recent decades, an ongoing trend has emerged in the upscaling of wind turbines in order to compete with traditional energy resources. For conventional wind turbines, aside from improving safety, the driving factors for new designs have always been increased efficiency and performance. This has led to novel wind turbine designs comprising thin...

Evaluating strut-and-tie models for concrete elements by nonlinear finite element analysis

The strut-and-tie method (STM) has been acknowledged as one of the most reliable tools for designing discontinuity regions in structural concrete. It is capable of producing safe designs consistently since it was developed as an extension of the lower-bound theorem of plasticity theory. However, to aptly address a physical problem of a concrete...

Explorative nonlinear pushover analyses for historical unreinforced masonry churches: A case study in Zandeweer, Groningen

In the past decades, gas productions in the province of Groningen in The Netherlands have caused a significant amount of shallow human-induced earthquakes. Its building stock has shown to be highly vulnerable to these unexpected events. Among various building typologies, damage has been reported for approximately 12.9% of the churches in...

Validation of Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis on Reinforced Concrete Slab under Concentrated Out-of-plane Load Combined with Uniaxial In-plane Load Based on Case Study

Finite element analysis is becoming a popular tool for engineers recently. Nonlinear finite element analysis is more advanced due to that it can deal with the nonlinearity of structures, which leads to more accurate approximation of structural behaviour. In Model Code 2010, nonlinear finite element analysis, which belongs to the higher level of...

Reliability assessment of corroded reinforced concrete structures: The effect of using random fields and nonlinear finite element analysis

One of the most severe deteriorations in reinforced concrete structures is associated with reinforcement corrosion, where the corrosion distribution shows considerable spatial variability. In the existing investigations of spatial variability of corrosion on the reliability of reinforced concrete structures, symbolic expressions are used for the...