Abstract

Structural engineers commonly design superstructures as fixed at the base and transmit the reactions to the infrastructure in order to design the foundation system and estimate the displacement of the soil while disregarding the change in seismic response that this induces. In this article, the foundation system was transformed into equivalent springs, and the seismic response in the linear range was compared and quantified, obtaining results such as increased periods, increased amounts of steel reinforcement in beams (between 7% and 25%) and columns (between 29% and 39%), an increase in the number of stirrups per linear meter (between 3% and 11% in columns and between 5% and 45% in beams) and drifts (between 1% and 14%), and a decrease in basal shear (up to 20%), which directly affects the design of the structure. This study concludes that the inclusion of the soil-structure interaction is necessary for structural design in the linear range.

Abstract

This article discusses the use of green roofs as rainfall water storage in its soil matrix. The methodology is analytical based on mathematical models, where runoff produced in an urban area is compared with current conditions of ordinary roofs with ceramic or bituminous materials as the original scenario, against another where green roofs are used. The study area is located in the Palavecino municipality of Lara state in Venezuela, in the flood zone of Quebrada Tabure. In this research, a quantitative comparison of the direct runoff hydrographs of the proposed scenarios was used, obtaining as a main result the reduction of runoff between 60 % and 80 % according to the period of return. An interesting point of this research was the incorporation of the routing of hydrographs on the roofs, reducing even more the peak flow over 90 %, and delaying the peak time of the generated hydrographs between 10 and 12 minutes while the total duration of the hydrographs increase more than three times.

Abstract

The following article presents the elaboration and results obtained from a 3D finite element, of the 8-node hexahedron type with 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) per node (48 DOF per element) based on third degree Hermitian polynomials, and of a 2-node structural element, with 6 DOF per node (12 DOF per element), based on third degree Hermitian polynomials and the theory of Timoshenko for beams. This article has two purposes; the first one is the formulation of a finite element capable of capturing bending effects, and the second one is to verify whether it is possible to obtain the deformation of the beam’s cross section of a structural member of the beam type, based on the deformations of its axis. The results obtained showed that the 8-node hexahedron FE was able to reproduce satisfactory results by simulating some cases of beams with different contour and load conditions, obtaining errors between 1% and 4% compared to the ANSYS software, educational version. Regarding the structural element of the beam type, it reproduced results that were not as precise as the FE Hexa 8, presenting errors of between 6% and 7% with regard to the axis but with error rounding between 10% and 20%.