Engineering Commons^™

Wind Performance Based Design For High-Rise Buildings, Alireza Mohammadi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rapid growth of high-rise high-density urban areas in coastal and near coastal, hurricane-prone cities has been observed globally and in the United States in recent decades. Favored by modern urban growth and planning policies, this trend is expected to accelerate in future. Recent climate change studies suggest a significant increase in the destructiveness of hurricanes in past 30 years by both increases in lifetime and intensity of hurricanes. Current prescriptive wind design approach does not provide transparent methods and criteria to reliably quantify the performance of buildings as well as the functional requirements necessary to accommodate large populations during …

Extending Use Of Simple For Dead Load And Continuous For Live Load (Sdcl) Steel Bridge System To Seismic Areas, Ramin Taghinezhadbilondy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The steel bridge system referred to as Simple for Dead load and Continuous for Live load (SDCL) has gained popularity in non-seismic areas of the country. Accordingly, it results in many advantages including enhanced service life and lower inspection and maintenance costs as compared to conventional steel systems. To-date, no research studies have been carried out to evaluate the behavior of the SDCL steel bridge system in seismic areas. The main objective of this research was to extend the application of SDCL to seismic areas.

The concept of the SDCL system was developed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a …

Database-Assisted Analysis And Design Of Wind Loads On Rigid Buildings, Filmon Fesehaye Habte

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The turbulent nature of the wind flow coupled with additional turbulence created by the wind-building interaction result in highly non-uniform, fluctuating wind-loading on building envelopes. This is true even for simple rectangular symmetric buildings. Building codes and standards should reflect the information on which they are based as closely as possible, and this should be achieved without making the building codes too complicated and/or bulky. However, given the complexity of wind loading on low-rise buildings, its codification can be difficult, and it often entails significant inconsistencies. This required the development of alternative design methods, such as the Database-Assisted-Design (DAD) methodology, …

On The Role Of The Pore Water Chemistry Of Deficient Post-Tension Grout To Promote Steel Corrosion, Samanbar Permeh

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Corrosion failure of post-tension tendons with pre-packaged thixotropic grout was documented in Florida Bridges in less than 10 years of service. Analysis of deficient grout in Florida post-tensioned (PT) bridges where severe corrosion developed indicated enhanced sulfate ion concentration, high pore water pH, enhanced moisture and low chloride content. The corrosion wasn’t consistent with the conventional causes of steel corrosion such as bleed water accumulation in grout void spaces, chloride contamination and pore water carbonation. Corrosion development was associated with deficient grout with enhanced sulfate levels. However, limited information is available on the corrosion behavior of PT strand in grout …