Experimental and Numerical Assessment of an Improved Plywood-Based In-Plane Retrofitting Method for Timber Floors in Highly Seismic Areas

Wood-based retrofitting techniques for seismic upgrading and architectural conservation of existing buildings have found increasing application in the last decades. With reference to the in-plane seismic strengthening of existing timber floors, a particularly efficient solution consists of an overlay of plywood panels fastened to the sheathing....

Synthetic Data Generation for the Creation of Bridge Digital Twins What-If Scenarios

The Digital Twin (DT) concept, as understood nowadays, appeared in the early 2000s as an attempt to create virtual replicas of physical assets, such as bridges, that can be used to examine, monitor and manage their performance. Up to this day, it has been successfully applied in the fields of aeronautics, manufacturing, medicine, and more...

Machine learning-based identification of vulnerability factors for masonry buildings in aggregate: The historicalcentre of casentino hit by the 2009 l'aquila earthquake

Seismic events in Italy and worldwide have highlighted the high vulnerability of unreinforced masonry (URM) structures in small historical centres. A key feature of these settlements is to be mostly composed of buildings in aggregate, i.e., interconnected by a more or less structurally effective connection. The seismic assessment of such...

Uncertainties in the Synthetic Data Generation for the Creation of Bridge Digital Twins

Digital twins (DTs) are virtual replicas of physical assets that can be used to monitor and manage their performance. To date, the DT concept has been effectively implemented in various industries, including aeronautics, manufacturing, medicine, and more recently, in the architecture, engineering, and construction sector. In the latter, these...

Sensor fault label identification for robust structural health monitoring

Health Monitoring strategies rely on tracking the health status of critical engineering structures (Structural Health Monitoring) and of people (monitoring of medical conditions) to detect anomalies in the measurements and make inferences on the health condition for supporting decisions on preventive actions to be implemented to restore...

On the investigation of utility functions on optimal sensor locations

Structural Health Monitoring uses data collected from sensors placed on structures to determine their operating condition and whether maintenance is required. Often, optimal sensor placement strategies are used to find the optimal locations for the identification of their modal properties, structural parameters and/or abnormal behaviours under...

Experimental and numerical study of historic masonry with bed joint reinforced repointing

Induced seismicity due to gas extraction in the province of Groningen in the Netherlands has a noticeable impact on building structures. Historic masonry structures in the area, which are non-engineered and lacking empirical design features often present in traditionally seismic regions, are especially vulnerable to dynamic loading. Compounding...

Dynamic Response Of Two Interacting Extensible Barsin Frictional Contact

In this paper, a new model is developed to describe the nonlinear dynamics of twoaxially deformable bars sliding relative to each other in which the interaction is governed byfriction. The first bar is fixed at one end and is subjected to a distributed normal force perpen-dicular to its axis to activate friction at the common interface, while...

The In-Plane Steady-State Response Of A Ring In Relative Motion To A Constant Load

Ring-like structures are very commonly used in civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering. Typical examples of such structures are components in turbomachinery, compliant gears, conventional pneumatic tires and more recent non-pneumatic tires, to name a few. In this paper, a ring on elastic foundation is considered. The foundation, modelled as...

Monitoring Monopile Penetration Through Magnetic Stray Field Measurements

Current methods to infer the penetration of a steel monopile during an offshore installation are rather inaccurate. Since a large number of foundation piles will be installed offshore in the coming years, a reliable technique to infer the penetration depth is vital. This paper proposes a non-contact method to monitor the pile progression into...

Experimental identification of the dynamic behaviour of pile-soil system installed by means of three different pile-driving techniques

A novel pile-driving technique, named Gentle Driving of Piles (GDP), that combines axial low-frequency and torsional high-frequency vibrations has been developed and tested recently. During the experimental campaign, several piles were installed onshore, making use of the GDP shaker. Besides those, a number of additional piles were installed...

A coupled modelling approach for the fast computation of underwater noise radiation from offshore pile driving

This paper presents a computationally efficient modelling approach for the prediction of underwater noise radiation from offshore pile driving. A near-source module is adopted to capture the interaction between the pile, fluid and soil, which is based on a previously developed semi-analytical vibro-acoustic model. This module primarily aims...

A Mode Matching Technique For The Seismic Response Of Liquid Storage Tanks Including Soil-Structure Interaction

The paper establishes a computationally inexpensive method to deal with the dynamic response of liquid storage tanks subjected to seismic excitation including dynamic soil-structure interaction. The tank is modelled as a thin shell, the stored liquid is described asan inviscid and incompressible fluid and the soil medium is modelled as an...

Reliability prediction of fatigue damage accumulation on wind turbine support structures

The evaluation of fatigue damage accumulation on wind turbine support structures under operational conditions is heavily influenced by a number of uncertainties. These uncertainties may, firstly, be attributed to the highly variable and complex environmental loads, and secondly, to the unavoidable modelling errors which mainly originate from the...

Free-surface flow simulations for moored and floating offshore platforms

During the development of the ComFLOW simulation method many challenges have to be tackled concerning the flow modelling and the numerical solution algorithm. Examples hereof are wave propagation, absorbing boundary conditions, fluid–solid body interaction, turbulence modeling and numerical efficiency. Some of these challenges will be discussed...

Topology optimization for additive manufacturing with controllable support structure costs

Advances in additive manufacturing (AM) allow economical production of components with unprecedented geometric complexity. This offers exciting opportunities for innovative designs, and particularly topology optimization has been identified as a key technique to fully exploit the capabilities of AM. However, also AM involves manufacturing...