Computational Methods in Engineering

---

---

In spite of the fact that the effect of earthquake on earth dams has been widely studied during the past decades, the complicated behavior of such earth structures against different seismological characteristics is still unknown. Such ambiguities necessitate more accurate studies using more comprehensive computation tools to achieve new results describing the behavior of such structures subjected to earthquake loading. In the present study, the simple soil model of elastic, perfectly plastic (based on the Mohr-Coulomb criterion), and Rayleigh damping criterion have been adopted for the soil. First, the numerical model employed was verified by dynamic analysis of real cases such as “Long Valley” and “santa Felecia” earth dams. The computational results were then compared with real recorded data or with those reported by other researchers. In addition to evaluating seismic stability of earth dams, their seismic stability was verified using pseudo-static analyses. Therefore, the “Carsington” dam was analyzed to verify the results of pseudo-static analyses and to check the results of FLAC software in calculating the pseudo-static factor of safety. The values of calculated factors of safety in the present study are in good agreement with the published results in the literature. Furthermore, the failure behavior revealed in the analysis shows the ability of FLAC software in defining the failure surface. In the main part of the analyses, a parametric study was conducted for different selected conditions and specially the effect of dam height and the optimum size of crest width were investigated. The results are presented in relevant diagrams.

---

---

Using Vibro-Impact Nonlinear Energy Sinks (VI NESs) is one of the novel strategies to control structural vibrations and mitigate their seismic response. In this system, a mass is tuned on the structure floor, so that it has a specific distance from an inelastic constraint connected to the floor mass. In case of structure stimulation, the displaced VI NES mass collides with the  inelastic constraint and upon impacts, energy is dissipated. In the present work, VI NES is studied when its parameters, including clearance and stiffness ratio, are simultaneously optimized. Harmony search as a recent meta-heuristic algorithm is efficiently specialized and utilized for the aforementioned continuous optimization problem. The optimized attached VI NES is thus shown to be capable of interacting with the primary structure over a wide range of frequencies. The resulting controlled response is then investigated, in a variety of low and medium rise steel moment frames, via nonlinear dynamic time history analyses. Capability of the VI NES to dissipate siesmic input energy of earthquakes and their capabilitiy in reducing response of srtructures effectively, through vibro-impacts between the energy sink’s mass and the floor mass, is discussed by extracting several performance indices and the corresponding Fourier spectra. Results of the numerical simulations done on some structural model examples reveal that the optimized VI NES has caused successive redistribution of energy from low-frequency high-amplitude vibration modes to high-frequency low-amplitude modes, bringing about the desired attenuation of the structural responses.

---

Accurate determination of the response of structures under dynamic loads such as earthquake loads plays an important role in the safe and economical design of structures. The purpose of this paper is to utilize a novel solution method based on the use of exponential basis functions for dynamic analysis of Bernoulli beam subjected to different types of base excitations. This method was firstly introduced for solving scalar wave propagation problems, named as stepwise time-weighted residual method. The proposed method considers the solution as a series of exponential basis functions with unknown constant coefficients; and the problem is solved in time without the need for spatial discretization of the beam and by using an appropriate recursive relation to correct the coefficients of the exponential bases. In order to apply the earthquake excitation, first by using the central finite difference relation, the earthquake acceleration history is converted to displacement history. Moreover, the displacement history is applied to the beam as a time-varying boundary condition. In this study, the capabilities of the proposed method in solving several sample problems of vibration of single and multi-span beams under various stimuli such as earthquake acceleration variations are compared with the results of other existing methods.