Issue 50

F. Jafari et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 50 (2019) 209-230; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.50.18 229 the building. However, there is a lack of numerical investigations for elaborating the effect of shotcrete sandwich panel and its performance improvement on earthquake load in the steel building. This paper combined two methods (FEM and ANFIS) for analyzing sandwich panel in the building. The present study has the following conclusions:  The frame weight decreases while the design decreases its displacement and the acceleration. One way of decreasing the building weight is to use sandwich panels instead of ordinary walls. In this research, the walls of brick material were compared with sandwich panels. The panel displacement and the acceleration were significantly decreased in the panels with shotcrete.  According to the diagrams, changing the shotcrete material (improved Young's modulus) decreases the response value of the frame, the concrete layers, and the displacement and acceleration of the insulating walls (the core).  Different points were considered in the frame and the displacement and acceleration measures were evaluated. Using Polystyrene insulating layer decreases the frame displacement. Since the core volume is twice the concrete layers volume and it is invariable in different models, more variation for displacements and acceleration was observed in the concrete layers diagrams; these layers have a significant effect on decreasing the displacements and acceleration of the frame.  Using the properties of ordinary brick instead of concrete and keeping other parameters such as shape and size of the building unchanged leads to an increase in displacement and acceleration.  Studying the displacements of 24-hour concrete and 63-day concrete shows that decreasing the Young's modulus led to more variation of the displacement and acceleration in all of the building panels. While in brick material, the maximum displacement measure occurs in the steel frame and the displacement is not damped in the building members (steel frame and concrete). Due to similar density of concrete in all the panels and models, increasing the Young's modulus improves the concrete panel behavior.  It is concluded that whatever decreases the panel core and the shotcrete layers density and increases their Young's modulus results in better seismic behavior of the sandwich panels.  ANFIS method, as a predictable method, has a good performance; this method can predict FEM result. In addition, it is able to elaborate the variation of displacement and acceleration. It is noteworthy that the amount of displacement and acceleration, which has been obtained with ANFIS, is very close to FEM. R EFERENCES [1] Shehata, M. and Klement, T. (2005). Curing silica fume shotcrete with wet-sprayed cellulose. Shotcrete.ASA. [2] Wolsiefer Sr, J. and Morgan, D. R. (1993). Silica fume in shotcrete. Concrete International, 15(4). [3] Metelli, G., Bettini, N. and Plizzari, G. (2011). Experimental and numerical studies on the behaviour of concrete sandwich panels. European Journal of Environmental and Civil Engineering, 15(10), pp. 1465-1481. [4] DOI: 10.1080/19648189.2011.9723354 [5] Palermo, M., Ricci, I., Silvestri, S., Gasparini, G., Trombetti, T., Foti, D. and Ivorra, S. (2014). Preliminary interpretation of shaking-table response of a full-scale 3-storey building composed of thin reinforced concrete sandwich walls. Engineering Structures, 76, pp. 75-89. DOI: 10.1016/j.engstruct.2014.06.024. [6] Yokozeki, T. and Iwamoto, K. (2016). Effects of core machining configuration on the debonding toughness of foam core sandwich panels. Advanced Composite Materials, 25(1), pp. 45-58. DOI: 10.1080/09243046.2014.958302. [7] Hashemi, S. J., Razzaghi, J. and Moghadam, A. S. (2017). Behaviour of sandwich panel infilled steel frames with different interface conditions. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers-Structures and Buildings, pp. 1-12. [8] Heywood, M. D., Ogden, R. G. and Moutaftsis, D. (2013). Profiled sandwich panels with deep foam cores in flexure. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers-Construction Materials, 167(1), pp. 42-56. [9] Rezaifar, O., Kabir, M. Z. & Tehranian, A. (2007). System Identification of Dynamic Behaviour of 4 Story Scaled 3D Panel Building Using Shaking Table, ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. DOI: 10.1016/j.engstruct.2007.03.019. [10] Palermo, M. and Trombetti, T. (2016). Experimentally-validated modelling of thin RC sandwich walls subjected to seismic loads. Engineering Structures, 119, pp. 95-109. [11] Lee, J. J. and Yun, C. B. (2007). Damage localization for bridges using probabilistic neural networks. KSCE Journal of civil engineering, 11(2), pp. 111-120. DOI: 10.1007/BF02823854. [12] Arslan, M. H. (2012). Estimation of curvature and displacement ductility in reinforced concrete buildings. KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering, 16(5), pp. 759-770. DOI: 10.1007/s12205-012-09581.