Summary: This paper presents the development of a deformable connection that is used to connect each floor system of the flexible gravity load resisting system (GLRS) with the stiff lateral force resisting system (LFRS) of an earthquake-resistant building. It is shown that the deformable connection acts as a seismic response modification device, which limits the lateral forces transferred from each floor to the LFRS and allows relative motion between the GLRS and LFRS. In addition, the floor accelerations and the LFRS story shears related to the highermode responses are reduced. The dispersion of peak responses is also significantly reduced. Numerical simulations of the earthquake response of a 12-story reinforced concrete shear wall example building with deformable connections are used to define an approximate feasible design space for the deformable connection. The responses of the example building model with deformable connections and the example building model with rigid-elastic connections are compared. Two configurations of the deformable connection are studied. In one configuration, a buckling restrained brace is used as the limited-strength load-carrying hysteretic component of the deformable connection, and in the other configuration, a friction device is used. Low damping laminated rubber bearings are used in both configurations to ensure the out-of-plane stability of the LFRS and to provide post-elastic stiffness to the deformable connection. Important experimental results from full-scale tests of the deformable connections are presented and used to calibrate numerical models of the connections.Original language English
Wireless smart sensors (WSS) have been proposed as an effective means to reduce the high cost of wired structural health monitoring systems. However, many damage scenarios for civil infrastructure involve sudden events, such as strong earthquakes, which can result in damage or even failure in a matter of seconds. Wireless monitoring systems typically employ duty cycling to reduce power consumption; hence, they will miss such events if they are in power-saving sleep mode when the events occur. This paper develops a demand-based WSS to meet the requirements of sudden event monitoring with minimal power budget and low response latency, without sacrificing high-fidelity measurements or risking a loss of critical information. In the proposed WSS, a programmable event-based switch is implemented utilizing a low-power trigger accelerometer; the switch is integrated in a high-fidelity sensor platform. Particularly, the approach can rapidly turn on the WSS upon the occurrence of a sudden event and seamlessly transition from low-power acceleration measurement to high-fidelity data acquisition. The capabilities of the proposed WSS are validated through laboratory and field experiments. The results show that the proposed approach is able to capture the occurrence of sudden events and provide high-fidelity data for structural condition assessment in an efficient manner.
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