Abstract

Earthquake problems in India need no introduction. Some of the great earthquakes of the world occurred in India and neighbourhood areas. During past two decades, India has witnessed 7 moderate earthquakes which caused large number of casualties and innumerable property loss. Most of these losses are due to poor quality of construction and generally low level of awareness of the earthquake hazard prevalent in the country. In this regard, there is a need for coordinated and sustained effort towards earthquake risk reduction in the country. This can be achieved through education and awareness building. In general, sensitization programmes are required to build awareness at all levels, however, it is most important at school level because they prepare the future generations from early age. It is necessary to prepare simple reading material so that children can understand the problems at an early age itself. In this paper, we are discussing our effort in organizing earthquake day in 50 schools. Initially 50 schools in Hyderabad city were selected and on an average around 100 school children ranging from 8th to 10 standard were sensitized in each school. Total duration of the programme was 18 months. On school earthquake day, planned activities are as follows: Session I Introduction to earthquakes through animated short videos Session II Explanation of awareness generating experimental models Session III Explanation of information posters related to disaster preparedness Session IV Explanation of preparation of earthquake safety kits Session V Earthquake quiz and puzzle games related to disasters The models and material used for demonstration was given to school for their future use. Overall the programme was successful and we received excellent feedback from schools.

Abstract

During past earthquakes there were some notable instances of collapse of light houses near gujarat coast. These damages can be minimized by proper evaluation of seismic hazard based on past history of earthquakes in the region. During Bhuj, 26th Jan 2001 earthquake of magnitude 7.9Mw, some structures have damaged a lot while others have little, the behavior of light house during earthquakes depends critically on its overall shape, size and geometry in addition to how the earthquake forces are carried to the ground. In this regard, we attempted to check the earthquake response of light houses of different geometries. For this purpose we selected three different light houses of three different shapes (square, hexagon, octagonal) of same height. All the three light houses are modeled using SAP 2000 and dynamic analysis is performed. Each light is subjected to ten different earthquake ground motions and responses are compared

Abstract

The world today has encountered with global warming and climate change. Besides other contributors, extraction of natural resources as building materials itself consume energy, cause environmental degradation and contribute to global warming. Buildings are the largest energy consumers and greenhouse gases emitters, both in the developed and developing countries. Urgent changes are therefore required relating to energy saving, emissions control, production and application of materials. Immediate suggestion related to use of renewable resources, and to recycling and reuse of building materials is necessary. This paper describes how much a typical building is contributing to global warming by releasing the carbon dioxide emission. And how the architects and building designers can decrease the amount of carbon footprint emitted from the building materials. As a case study a 3-story building made of commonly used materials; concrete, brick, stone and glass has been selected. Total quantity of carbon emission is estimated and finally suggestions are given to reduce carbon dioxide emission.

Abstract

The main objective of the project is Vulnerability Assessment of Port buildings in different port regions along west coast of India. It includes development of earthquake scenario and fragility curves, which describes in detail the effects and consequences of a hypothetical earthquake at that region. In this paper the plan, elevation and design details of the port building near the Pipavav port is mentioned. For performance evaluation, a 3-dimensional model of the structure was generated. Analysis and design is performed on the structure. Pushover analysis is done for each earthquake data, and the graph is plotted for displacement vs load and displacement vs stiffness. Hence stiffness degradation for each earthquake data for its maximum displacement is determined and fragility curve is developed for the port building. A 3-dimensional model of the structure was modeled in STAAD.Pro and seismic base shear is calculated for the structure using the IScode 1893 (Part1:2002) and the linear time history analysis is carried out on the structure.

Abstract

Analysis and design of high-rise buildings for lateral load such as wind load and earthquake are the major issues which are playing significant role in recent decades .This paper describes a recent application of the computational fluid dynamics technique for wind analysis. Conventional wind analysis suggests wind tunnel experiment for arriving at the wind forces for a given structural form. As a case study a regural 38-story high-rise building (Jamieson place, Calgary Canada) made of concrete with shear wall ,built in downtown Calgary 2010 is selected. It is assumed that the building is located in highly seismic area. The design objective was to develop most cost-effective structural system while meeting building functionality goals and adhering to code requirement. The main structural design issues considered in this building are reviewed: Static analysis, Dynamic Analysis, Wind Analysis and Stability Analysis. Initial static and dynamic analysis is conducted in SAP and later wind analysis is conducted in Ansys as opposed to wind tunnel experiments. The building model is modeled in Ansys workbench and then the mesh file is imported to Ansys CFX for CFD simulation and analysis. After CFD analysis the wind forces on the building model are extracted in Ansys CFX-Post and imported to the structural model in SAP 2000 for the structural analysis.

Abstract

Presently India is home for about 1.2 billion people. This suggests that about 300 million houses are necessary to house them. According to National Housing Policy 2007 (NUHHP, 2007), the housing shortage is estimated to be about 25 million. And according to 2001 Census (Census 2001), Indian urban population constitutes 27.8%. However, it is increasing at an alarming rate of 4% per year. Further, population in India is distributed unevenly with minimum of 50 persons per km2 in some districts and upto 14000 persons per km2 in some other districts. Rural districts have upto 100 houses per km2 , towns 1000-1500 houses per km2 , cities 1500-2500 houses per km2 and urban centres and metros have as high as 7000 houses per km2. In addition, there is a great shift of population from rural to urban areas thus increasing the densities of population in urban areas. The number and proportion of cities with a population of one million or more has grown significantly in recent decades. From 12 in 1981 with 26.8% share of the total population, the number of million-plus cities has increased to 35 in 2001 with 37% share of the total urban population. On the other hand the dominant materials of choice for building were

Abstract

Bhuj earthquake of 26 January 2001 caused 14,000 casualties. Main reason for such huge casualties is low earthquake awareness and poor construction practices. Based on the technology advancement and knowledge gained after earthquake occurrences, the seismic code is usually revised. Last revision of IS 1893 (Criteria for earthquake resistant design of structures) was done in 2002 after a long gap of about 18 years. Some new clauses were included and some old provisions were updated. Assuming that concerned authorities will take enough steps for code compliance and the structures that are being constructed are earthquake resistant. In this light, what will happen to the safety of precode revision structures? These structures carry major percentage of vulnerable structure stock. Even if we have a very good disaster response system, it is impossible to reduce earthquake damage without considering the safety of precode revision structures. In this regard, a comprehensive study of seismic risk assessment of Gujarat is necessary. As a pilot study, government of Gujarat selected Gandhidham and Adipur cities in Kachchh district. Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) was conducted on 16000 buildings in Gandhidham and Adipur cities. Though, there are varied construction practices, about 26% of buildings were predominantly RCC type and 74% of masonry structure were found. RVS score of these structures reveal that in general buildings are of low quality and further evaluation and strengthening of buildings is recommended. The procedure adopted in this study is threetier method, i.e., Tier 1. Rapid Visual Screening, Tier 2. Preliminary assessment and Tier 3. Detailed assessment

Abstract

Disaster Demand for electricity in urban areas is increasing world over, because electricity is the prime lifeline support. Due to increase in fossil fuel prices coupled with concerns related to global warming, demand for nuclear energy is increasing. Around 30 countries are now using nuclear energy for production of electricity. However, its share in electricity production is varying from country to country. In some countries it is only 3% and in some countries it is around 50%. In light of March 2011 nuclear energy are reviewing the safety of their reactors against natural disasters. In this regard, authors proposed to study the current and projected nuclear energy demand for electricity supply in urban areas of India on one hand and scenario of seismic hazard and risk on the other hand.

Abstract

Biometric identification often involves explicit com-parison of a probe template against each template stored in a database. This approach becomes extremely time-consuming as the size of the database increases. Filtering approaches use alight-weight comparison to reduce the database to smaller set of candidates for explicit comparison. However, most existing filtering schemes use specific features that are hand-crafted for the biometric trait at each stage of the filtering. In this work,we show that a cascade of simple linear projections on random lines can achieve significant levels of filtering. Each stage offiltering consists of projecting the probe onto a specific line and removal of database samples outside a window around the probe.The approach provides a way of automatic generation of filters and avoids the need of developing specific features for different biometric traits. The method also provides us with a variety of parameters such as the projection lines, the number and order of projections, and the window sizes to customize the filtering process to a specific application. Experimental results show that using an ensemble of projections reduce the search space by 60%without increasing the false negative identification rate.

Abstract

In order to incorporate various writing styles orfonts in a character recognizer, it is critical that a large amount of labeled data is available, which is difficult to obtain. In this work, we present a semi-supervised SVM based framework that can incorporate the unlabeled data for improvement of recognition performance. Existing semi-supervised learning methods for SVMs work well only for two-class problems. We propose a method to extend this to large-class problems by incorporating a participation termin to the optimization process. The proposed system uses a Decision Directed Acyclic Graphs (DDAG) of SVM classifiers,which have proven to be very effective for such recognition problems. We present experimental results on three different digits dataset with varying complexity, as well as additional multi-class datasets from the UCI repository for comparison with existing approaches. In addition we show that approximate annotations at the word or sentence level can be used for evaluation as well as active learning to further improve there cognition results.