Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures provides requirements for general structural design and includes means for determining dead, live, soil, flood, wind, snow, rain, atmospheric ice, and earthquake loads, as well as their combinations, which are suitable for inclusion in building codes and other documents. This Standard, a revision of ASCE/SEI 7-05, offers a complete update and reorganization of the wind load provisions, expanding them from one chapter into six. The Standard contains new ultimate event wind maps with corresponding reductions in load factors, so that the loads are not affected, and updates the seismic loads with new risk-targeted seismic maps. The snow, live, and atmospheric icing provisions are updated as well. In addition, the Standard includes a detailed Commentary with explanatory and supplementary information designed to assist building code committees and regulatory authorities. Standard ASCE/SEI 7 is an integral part of building codes in the United States. Many of the load provisions are substantially adopted by reference in the International Building Code and the NFPA 5000 Building Construction and Safety Code. Structural engineers, architects, and those engaged in preparing and administering local building codes will find this Standard an essential reference in their practice. Note: New orders are fulfilled from the second printing, which incorporates the errata to the first printing.

Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures

Summary
Given their excellent self-centering and energy-dissipating capabilities, superelastic shape memory alloys (SMAs) become an emerging structural material in the field of earthquake engineering. This paper presents experimental and numerical studies on a scaled self-centering steel frame with novel SMA braces (SMAB), which utilize superelastic Ni–Ti wires. The braces were fabricated and cyclically characterized before their installation in a two-story one-bay steel frame. The equivalent viscous damping ratio and ‘post-yield’ stiffness ratio of the tested braces are around 5% and 0.15, respectively. In particular, the frame was seismically designed with nearly all pin connections, including the pinned column bases. To assess the seismic performance of the SMA braced frame (SMABF), a series of shake table tests were conducted, in which the SMABF was subjected to ground motions with incremental seismic intensity levels. No repair or replacement of structural members was performed during the entire series of tests. Experimental results showed that the SMAB could withstand several strong earthquakes with very limited capacity degradation. Thanks to the self-centering capacity and pin-connection design, the steel frame was subjected to limited damage and zero residual deformation even if the peak interstory drift ratio exceeded 2%. Good agreement was found between the experimental results and numerical simulations. The current study validates the prospect of using SMAB as a standalone seismic-resisting component in critical building structures when high seismic performance or earthquake resilience is desirable under moderate and strong earthquakes. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shake table test and numerical study of self‐centering steel frame with SMA braces

In recent years, several metaheuristic algorithms have been introduced in engineering and scientific fields to address real-life optimization problems. In this study, a novel nature-inspired metaheuristics algorithm named as Snake Optimizer (SO) is proposed to tackle a various set of optimization tasks which imitates the special mating behavior of snakes. Each snake (male/female) fights to have the best partner if the existed quantity of food is enough and the temperature is low. This study mathematically mimics and models such foraging and reproduction behaviors and patterns to present a simple and efficient optimization algorithm. To verify the validity and superiority of the proposed method, SO is tested on 29 unconstrained Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2017 benchmark functions and four constrained real-world engineering problems. SO is compared with other 9 well-known and newly developed algorithms such as Linear population size reduction-Success-History Adaptation for Differential Evolution (L-SHADE), Ensemble Sinusoidal incorporated with L-SHADE (LSHADE-EpSin), Covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMAES), Coyote Optimization Algorithm (COA), Moth-flame Optimization, Harris Hawks Optimizer, Thermal Exchange optimization, Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm, and Whale Optimization Algorithm. Experimental results and statistical comparisons prove the effectiveness and efficiency of SO on different landscapes with respect to exploration–exploitation balance and convergence curve speed. The source code is currently available for public from: https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/106465-snake-optimizer 

Snake Optimizer: A novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm

Unfortunately, nowadays students are taught that when they embark on research they first have to learn methodology, and that when they write up that research they should start by explaining their methodology. Even worse, they are often led to believe that there is such a subject as methodology. This needs to be unravelled.

Assessing the Evidence

Stochastic configuration network (SCN), as a novel incremental generation model with supervisory mechanism, has an excellent superiority in solving large-scale data regression and classification problems. However, the accuracy of the SCN is affected by the assignation and selection of some network parameters significantly Sparrow search algorithm (SSA) is a new meta-heuristic algorithm that simulates the foraging and anti-predation behavior of sparrow population. In this paper, a stochastic configuration network based on chaotic sparrow search algorithm is first introduced, termed as CSSA-SCN. Firstly, chaotic sparrow search algorithm (CSSA) is designed which mainly utilizes logistic mapping, self-adaptive hyper-parameters, mutation operator to enhance the global optimization capability of SSA; Secondly, as the performance of SCN is related to regularization parameter r and scale factor λ of weights and biases, then CSSA is employed to give better parameters for SCN automatically; Finally, 13 benchmark functions and several datasets are used to evaluate the performance of CSSA and CSSA-SCN respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and validity of CSSA-SCN compared with SCN and other contrast algorithms.

A stochastic configuration network based on chaotic sparrow search algorithm

BRBF response modification factor

A new optimization method namely the Search and Rescue optimization algorithm (SAR) is presented here to solve constrained engineering optimization problems. This metaheuristic algorithm imitates the explorations behavior of humans during search and rescue operations. The e-constrained method is utilized as a constraint-handling technique. Besides, a restart strategy is proposed to avoid local infeasible minima in some complex constrained optimization problems. SAR is applied to solve 18 benchmark constraint functions presented in CEC 2010, 13 benchmark constraint functions, and 7 constrained engineering design problems reported in the specialized literature. The performance of SAR is compared with some state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. According to the statistical comparison results, the performance of SAR is better or highly competitive against the compared algorithms on most of the studied problems.

Search and Rescue optimization algorithm: a new optimization method for solving constrained engineering optimization problems

Seismic response of steel braced frames with shape memory alloy braces

https://research.iaun.ac.ir/pd/izadiniaold/pdfs/HomeWork_5484.pdf

Behrouz Asgarian

Papers

BRBF response modification factor

Search and Rescue optimization algorithm: a new optimization method for solving constrained engineering optimization problems

Seismic response of steel braced frames with shape memory alloy braces

Seismic performance evaluation of steel moment resisting frames through incremental dynamic analysis

Damage detection of jacket type offshore platforms using rate of signal energy using wavelet packet transform