Buckling analysis of circular plates of functionally graded materials under uniform radial compression

This study presents the buckling analysis of radially loaded solid circular plate made of functionally graded material. The edge of the plate is either simply supported or clamped and the plate is assumed to be geometrically perfect. The equilibrium and stability equations, derived through variational formulation, are used to determine the prebuckling forces and critical buckling loads. The equations are based on Love–Kirchhoff hypothesis and the Sander's non-linear strain-displacement relation. The results are verified with the known results in the literature.     

Dominant role of drivers’ attitude in prevention of road traffic crashes: A study on knowledge,attitude, and practice of drivers in Iran

Objective

Evaluating the relation between Iranian drivers’ knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) regarding traffic regulations, and their deterministic effect on road traffic crashes (RTCs).

Setting

Two cities of Tehran and Zahedan, Iran.

Methods

A cross-sectional study was designed. Using a simplified cluster sampling design, 2200 motor vehicle drivers including 1200 in Tehran and 1000 in Zahedan were selected. Sixty locations in Tehran and 50 in Zahedan were chosen. In each pre-identified location, 20 adult drivers were approached consecutively. A questionnaire developed by researchers was filled by each participant. The questionnaire had four sections including items assessing the demographics, knowledge, attitude and practice of drivers toward traffic regulations. Logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between the RTCs and KAP variables.

Results

The study sample consisted of 619 (28.1%) occupational and 1580 (71.8%) private drivers. Among them, 86.4% were male. The median age was 33.6 ± 10.83. Drivers in Tehran and Zahedan had no significant differences between their mean scores of KAP items of the questionnaire. Higher knowledge, safer attitude, and safer practice were associated with a decreased number of RTC. After adjusting for possible confounders, increase of one standard deviation in attitude and practice scores (but not knowledge) resulted in 26.4% and 18.5% decrease in RTC, respectively. Finally, considering knowledge, attitude and practice of drivers in one model to assess their mutual effect, it was shown that only attitude is significantly associated with a decrease of RTC (OR = 0.76, P = 0.007).

Conclusion

Increase in attitude and practice accompanied with decreased number of RTCs in Iranian drivers. Specifically, drivers’ attitude had the crucial effect. It is not knowledge and standard traffic education; rather it is how such education is registered as an attitude that translates what is being learned into actions. Without safer attitude, even safer self-reported practice will not result in lower RTCs.     

User Capacity Scaling Laws of Multi-user Fading Channels in the Presence of MMSE Channel Estimators

Considering development of delay-sensitive applications in wireless communications and cellular networks along with lack of system resources and environmental factors including fading and noise all together make it impossible for all users to be active and to achieve quality of service requirements simultaneously. To analyze wireless systems performance, user capacity is defined as the maximum number of users that can be activated at the same time. In order to obtain user capacity scaling laws, channel distribution information is required and channel gains can be estimated by different channel estimators such as minimum mean square error estimators. In this paper, estimated channel gains are substituted for true channel gains and effects of imperfect channel estimation errors on the user capacity scaling laws are analyzed. It is shown that the user capacity scales double logarithmically and there is a gap depending on channel estimators accuracy between the lower and upper bounds. Moreover, assuming estimated channels for different users are independent and identically distributed, it is shown that the user capacity scaling laws are asymptotically tight.     

Understanding Humidity-Enhanced Adhesion of Geckos: Deep Neural Network-Assisted Multi-Scale Molecular Modeling

A higher relative humidity leads to an increased sticking power of gecko feet to surfaces. The molecular mechanism responsible for this increase, however, is not clear. Capillary forces, water mediating keratin-surface contacts and water-induced softening of the keratin are proposed as candidates. In previous work, strong evidence for water mediation is found but indirect effects via increased flexibility are not completely ruled out. This article studies the latter hypothesis by a bottom-up coarse-grained mesoscale model of an entire gecko spatula designed without explicit water particles, so that capillary action and water-mediation are excluded. The elasticity of this model is adjusted with a deep neural network to atomistic elastic constants, including water at different concentrations. Our results show clearly that on nanoscopic flat surfaces, the softening of keratin by water uptake cannot nearly account for the experimentally observed increase in gecko sticking power. Here, the dominant mechanism is the mediation of keratin-surface contacts by intervening water molecules. This mechanism remains important on nanostructured surfaces. Here, however, a water-induced increase of the keratin flexibility may enable the spatula to follow surface features smaller than itself and thereby increase the number of contacts with the surface. This leads to an appreciable but not dominant contribution to the humidity-increased adhesion. Recently, by atomistic grand-canonical molecular dynamics simulation, the room-temperature isotherm is obtained for the sorption of water into gecko keratin, to the authors’ knowledge, the first such relation for any beta-keratin. In this work, it relates the equilibrium water content of the keratin to the ambient relative humidity.     

Efficient Coupling in Transverse Strip Metal-Insulator-Metal Structure on Silicon-on-Insulator Layer Stack

Silicon - This article presents a new directional coupling between two transverse strip metal-insulator-metal (TS-MIM) waveguides on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform at 1.55 μm...     

Multistage-batch bipolar membrane electrodialysis for base production from high-salinity wastewater

Bipolar membrane electrodialysis (BMED) is considered a state-of-the-art technology for the conversion of salts into acids and bases. However, the low concentration of base generated from a traditional BMED process may limit the viability of this technology for a large-scale application. Herein, we report an especially designed multistage-batch (two/three-stage-batch) BMED process to increase the base concentration by adjusting different volume ratios in the acid (V_acid), base (V_base), and salt compartments (V_salt). The findings indicated that performance of the two-stage-batch with a volume ratio of V_acid:V_base:V_salt = 1:1:5 was superior in comparison to the three-stage-batch with a volume ratio of V_acid:V_base:V_salt = 1:1:2. Besides, the base concentration could be further increased by exchanging the acid produced in the acid compartment with fresh water in the second stage-batch process. With the two-stage-batch BMED, the maximum concentration of the base can be obtained up to 3.40 mol∙L^–1, which was higher than the most reported base production by BMED. The low energy consumption and high current efficiency further authenticate that the designed process is reliable, cost-effective, and more productive to convert saline water into valuable industrial commodities.