In many situations, it is necessary to have a beam web opening in the plastic hinge location. However, very limited studies investigated the behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) beam-column joints with nearby beam web openings. A previous study was conducted for investigating the behavior of beam-column joints with unreinforced nearby web opening. In this study, the effect of adding additional reinforcing around a nearby web opening on the seismic behavior of RC exterior Beam-Column joints is being investigated. Nine full-scale beam-column joints were tested, four joints had an unreinforced opening, while five joints had reinforced opening. The behavior of the beam-column joints is described in terms of maximum resisting load, deflection, energy dissipated, and stiffness degradation. The behavior was significantly affected by the nearby opening. The increase in opening width and the reduction in the distance between the opening and the column resulted in decreasing the strength and ductility of the RC beam-column joint. However, adding additional reinforcement improved the behavior. Thus, it is recommended to provide additional reinforcement all around the opening.

Abstract

the paper presents an efficient scheme for a Nonlinear PID (NPID) controller to improve the dynamic response of the Electric Vehicle (EV). The objective of the proposed controller is to track accurately the reference speed selected by the driver of the EV. A MATLAB/Simulink model is established and validated for the considered EV to study the system performance. The proposed NPID controller has been investigated by comparing it with the traditional PID controller. The optimal parameters of Both the NPID and PID controllers were obtained using the Harmony Search (HS) optimization technique based on a cost function. The desired rise time, settling time, steady-state error, and overshoot have been taken into account in the cost function. Two tests were performed, the first test was implemented at fixed reference speed while the second one was carried out at a staircase command of reference speed. The simulation results can be summarized as follows: in the first test, the NPID controller reaches the steady-state speed at 38.12 seconds while the PID controller stabilizes at 44.68 seconds. Moreover, the NPID controller has a 0.5% steady-state error however, the PID controller has a 4% steady-state error. Besides, the second test shows that the NPID controller can decrease the root mean square of error by 30.1% compared to the PID controller. Lastly, the proposed NPID controller can enhance EV performance significantly.