Investigation of construction material quality and workmanship defects of RC buildings collapsed and severely damaged in the 6.8 Mw Sivrice, Elazığ, Turkey earthquake, January 2020

In the Sivrice, Elazığ, Turkey earthquake on January 24, 2020, 41 people lost their lives, more than 1600 people were injured, 672 buildings collapsed, and around 12600 buildings were severely damaged due to poor construction quality. After such devastating earthquakes, damage assessment and forensic investigations are normally carried out quickly for a judicial process, and material qualities are revealed. However, emotional sensitivity of the victims in the earthquake affected zone and disruptions in key lifeline services such as transportation, electricity supply often make these processes difficult. After the Elazığ earthquake, along with the conventional in-situ core sampling method, concrete pieces were collected from columns of collapsed and severely damaged buildings and transported out of the earthquake zone to overcome these adverse conditions. Unlike in the conventional method where the whole sampling process is carried out in the earthquake zone, the core extraction from the transported concrete pieces was carried out outside the earthquake-affected area. The extracted concrete samples were checked for compliance with the prevailing material standards. Moreover, multiple reinforcing bars of various diameters were also extracted and tested to check their compliance with the standards. Besides, the results of examination of the quality of materials and workmanship used in the construction are also discussed, along with the precautions required to minimize fatalities and damage from similar buildings.

Abstract Cores in Implicit Hitting Set MaxSat Solving (Extended Abstract)

Maximum satisfiability (MaxSat) solving is an active area of research motivated by numerous successful applications to solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. One of the most successful approaches for solving MaxSat instances from real world domains are the so called implicit hitting set (IHS) solvers. IHS solvers decouple MaxSat solving into separate core-extraction (i.e. reasoning) and optimization steps which are tackled by a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and an integer linear programming (IP) solver, respectively. While the approach shows state-of-the-art performance on many industrial instances, it is known that there exists instances on which IHS solvers need to extract an exponential number of cores before terminating. Motivated by the simplest of these problematic instances, we propose abstract cores, a compact representation for a potentially exponential number of regular cores. We demonstrate how to incorporate abstract core reasoning into the IHS algorithm and report on an empirical evaluation demonstrating, that including abstract cores into a state-of-the-art IHS solver improves its performance enough to surpass the best performing solvers of the 2019 MaxSat Evaluation.

Identification and analysis of pathological defect appearance in superstructures of reinforced-concrete bridges in Chapare region, Bolivia

The objective of this article is to identify and analyze the main pathological manifestations in bridges in the Chapare - Bolivia region, an area characterized by high humidity and constant rainfall throughout the year. The methodology consisted of the selection of five bridges that showed evident signs of deterioration, in which a visual inspection was carried out and, subsequently, different tests: sclerometer, carbonation depth, penetration of chlorides and core extraction. All the bridges present advanced states of deterioration; highlighting corrosion as the main problem, generating detachment of the concrete and risk of collapse. Although the concrete has a compression strength greater than 30 MPa, the existing carbonation process and the different problems encountered compromises it. It is necessary that the entities in charge provide inspection and maintenance programs according to the environmental and structural characteristics of each bridge.

COMBINED METHOD FOR CLEANING PIPES FROM SOIL CORE

The paper is devoted to solving an urgent problem - improving the technology of soil excavation during trenchless pipe laying by vibro-impact pushing with the leading steel casing of the well. A new method for core extraction is proposed, which is based on the effect of its vibration transportation under the influence of combined static-dynamic load. The optimum level of soil moisture is experimentally determined, which contributes to a decrease in lateral friction when it moves along a metal pipe cavity. The results of pilot tests on cleaning a pipe 530 mm in diameter, immersed in soil at full design length of transition using Typhoon-190 pneumatic hammer with a mass of 190 kg are presented. The velocity characteristic of core displacement at changing its moisture content is obtained.

Compression resistance of repaired structural concrete elements after core extraction

Core sampling for testing is considered a reliable method to provide information on structural materials and is one of the most implemented techniques in the evaluation of concrete elements. However, core drilling results in a decrease in cross section that can compromise structural mechanical strength even if the extracted section is repaired. Norm NBR 7680-1 recommends dry pack as a repair method but also allows the use of other techniques as long as its effectiveness is proven. This work evaluated the resistance of repaired structural prototypes after core drilling sampling. Concrete blocks with 20 MPa resistance were produced from which cores of 100 mm, 75 mm and 50 mm in diameter were extracted. The blocks were repaired with 20 MPa concrete, grout and dry pack techniques. The reconstitution with concrete showed poorest performance, while dry pack led to strengths even higher when compared to reference values.

Graph Mining Meets Crowdsourcing: Extracting Experts for Answer Aggregation

Aggregating responses from crowd workers is a fundamental task in the process of crowdsourcing. In cases where a few experts are overwhelmed by a large number of non-experts, most answer aggregation algorithms such as the majority voting fail to identify the correct answers. Therefore, it is crucial to extract reliable experts from the crowd workers. In this study, we introduce the notion of "expert core", which is a set of workers that is very unlikely to contain a non-expert. We design a graph-mining-based efficient algorithm that exactly computes the expert core. To answer the aggregation task, we propose two types of algorithms. The first one incorporates the expert core into existing answer aggregation algorithms such as the majority voting, whereas the second one utilizes information provided by the expert core extraction algorithm pertaining to the reliability of workers. We then give a theoretical justification for the first type of algorithm. Computational experiments using synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed answer aggregation algorithms outperform state-of-the-art algorithms.

Core-Guided Minimal Correction Set and Core Enumeration

A set of constraints is unsatisfiable if there is no solution that satisfies these constraints. To analyse unsatisfiable problems, the user needs to understand where inconsistencies come from and how they can be repaired. Minimal unsatisfiable cores and correction sets are important subsets of constraints that enable such analysis. In this work, we propose a new algorithm for extracting minimal unsatisfiable cores and correction sets simultaneously. Building on top of the relaxation and strengthening framework, we introduce novel techniques for extracting these sets. Our new solver significantly outperforms several state of the art algorithms on common benchmarks when it comes to extracting correction sets and compares favorably on core extraction.

Seismic Retrofit of Defective RC Beam-Column Joints

Strong earthquakes always occur in countries with seismic risk and can potentially cause multiple deaths. This study investigates the seismic vulnerability of RC beam-column connections. Generally, it is impractical to simultaneously set up the molds of the concrete beam, ceiling and column and achieve a uniform concrete and this can cause numerous constructional deficiencies. Usually, these deficiencies can be instrumental in the failure of RC frames. Therefore, this study investigates the performance of a defective RC beam-column connection and provides a method to improve the behavior of the connection. The defective connection studied herein belongs to a high school in the city of Kermanshah, Iran. Many factors that affect the performance of the retrofitting designs are studied. Also, all of the parameters used in the analyses were obtained based upon the actual behavior of the material through core extraction and tensile tests. Finally, an optimal design is proposed.