Publisher's Synopsis
Civil Engineers are involved with the creation, monitoring and management of infrastructural resources, as well as the efficient, economic utilization and management of renewable natural resources like water, including the preservation of its quality. Nowadays a rapid growth of computer performance enables and encourages new developments in Civil Engineering as well as related areas. Particularly, within the field of structural mechanics, the modeling of materials and therefore the prediction of structural response is more accurate than in past decades. Environmental engineers work to provide safe drinking water, treat and dispose of solid waste, cleanup sites contaminated by hazardous waste, and maintain air and water quality. One of the areas of environmental engineering which really pioneered the use of optimization techniques is Water Resources Systems planning, design, operation and management. Optimization tools are utilized to facilitate optimal decision making in the planning, design and operation of especially large scale water resources systems. The use of optimization tools as the most important component of Decision Support Systems are not confined only to the quantity aspect of water. This novel volume covers the state of-the-art of structural design optimisation in research and its practical application in the civil and environmental engineering. The volume mainly deals the methods as well as problems with emphasis on applications to Civil Engineering topics. And also as nowadays very popular optimization methods, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) will be presented as one of the possible ways how to solve today's challenging optimization problems that we are often facing. A design optimization for the reinforced concrete plane frame structure in order to minimize the cost of the concrete and steel for beams and columns by adopting the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) computational model trough the NeuroShell-2 software program is presented. With the rapid development of modern engineering technology, higher requirements have been put forward for the modeling and applicability of buildings. The supporting structures in buildings are becoming more and more light, and the requirements for structural dynamic characteristics are increasing. As the building envelope structure, the structure of the curtain wall is becoming lighter and lighter, so the vibration of the structure is more prominent. Building curtain wall industry is an edge industry. To discuss the structure design and optimization of building curtain wall, the dynamic characteristics of point supported glass curtain wall system are analyzed by the finite element method. Additionally, a chapter presents the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method in the field of environmental management. The chapter shows how to use the results of environmental engineering tools or models as an input for the AHP method. This volume also covers optimization of I-sectional flange beams and the corrosion rate and resistivity of the steel reinforcement of calcium aluminate cement mortar with regard to environmental factors (temperature and chloride content) and mortar quality (water/cement ratio).