A knowledge-based system is presented that has been developed to be used as an advisor in the preliminary design stage of HVAC systems. It enables designers to configure and size HVAC equipment for different climatic conditions, in terms of building type, indoor requirements, outdoor and indoor air pollution. A new approach has been used in building the system, using a modified knowledge engine...

Near field earthquakes have imposed major damage to buildings in the past years. In some cases, the intensity of such damage is too considerable to be disregarded. The most effective way to improve seismic performance of buildings is applying a seismic control technique. The cylindrical friction damper is one of these methods, which has become popular for its desirable performance in the energy...

A simplified fragility analysis of steel building frame is presented which can be used for preliminary estimate of its probability of failure. The risk analysis procedure uses the format of probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA) and considers band limited white noise at the bed rock as the seismic input. The steel building frame is modeled as a 2D frame and Pushover analysis is then carried out to o...

Latent Gaussian models are flexible models that are applied in several statistical applications. When posterior marginals or full conditional distributions in hierarchical Bayesian inference from these models are not available in closed form, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are implemented. The component dependence of the latent field usually causes increase in computational time and divergenc...

The present study focusses on the damping force control of shear mode magnetorheological (MR) damper for seismic mitigations. Therefore, the semi-active MR damper which can control the vibration is analyzed both experimentally and numerically. Carbonyl iron is used as the magnetic particle and Castrol Magnetec oil as carrier fluid throughout the study. MR damper is designed and fabricated, and ...

We are developing an intelligent interface for the many design evaluation programs becoming available in architecture. As the central part of this project we have developed a model of buildings, capable of holding all the information needed to describe a building to a number of design tools commonly used by architects. The model also contains knowledge about components in a building and their i...