Strengthening of Preloaded RC Beams Using Hybrid Carbon Sheets

Reinforced concrete (RC) beams subject to service loads of 40 or 60% of steel yielding were strengthened using hybrid continuous carbon fiber sheets. The hybrid systems were made of high-strength and high-modulus carbon sheets, and compared with systems using only high-strength carbon. It was found that the use of high-modulus carbon sheets in hybrid systems could increase the yielding load, the flexural stiffness, the postyielding ductility, and reduce the crack opening in concrete. The slope changes on load-deflection curves at steel yielding are not noticeable in hybrid systems. The tensile strains developed in hybrid sheets after the fracture of high-modulus carbon are higher in magnitude and distributed in a larger area, leading to an ultimate carbon fracture with concrete crushing. These unique features are attributed to the high stiffness and low ultimate tensile strain of the high-modulus carbon fibers which stiffen the structures, avoid or delay the fiber-reinforced polymer debonding, and facilitate the deformability during their subsequent breakdown.     

Introducing Students to Professional Practice in Civil Engineering

This paper describes a module that was introduced into a civil engineering degree program with the help of professional engineers. The aim was to develop a bridge between the world of learning and professional practice by putting students in the role of consulting engineers working with industry to produce a feasible solution to a real inquiry from a client. The module is placed in context by comparing the goals of accredited civil engineering programs in the United Kingdom and America, by describing how it is linked to the degree program and by explaining the matrix developed to identify the skills the students needed to demonstrate their ability to practice as professional engineers. Details of the module are given with examples of student work and feedback.     

Facility layout problems: A survey

Layout problems are found in several types of manufacturing systems. Typically, layout problems are related to the location of facilities (e.g., machines, departments) in a plant. They are known to greatly impact the system performance. Most of these problems are NP hard. Numerous research works related to facility layout have been published. A few literature reviews exist, but they are not recent or are restricted to certain specific aspects of these problems. The literature analysis given here is recent and not restricted to specific considerations about layout design.

We suggest a general framework to analyze the literature and present existing works using such criteria as: the manufacturing system features, static/dynamic considerations, continual/discrete representation, problem formulation, and resolution approach. Several research directions are pointed out and discussed in our conclusion.     

Local Exact Particle Tracing on Unstructured Grids

For analyzing and interpreting results of flow simulations, particle tracing is a well established visualization method. In addition, it is a preliminary step for more advanced techniques such as line integral convolution. For interactive exploration of large data sets, a very efficient and reliable particle tracing method is needed. For wind channel experiments or flight simulations, large unstructured computational grids have become common practice. Traditional approachs, based on numerical integration methods of ordinary differential equations however fail to deliver sufficiently accurate path calculation at the speed required for interactive use. In this paper we extend the local exact approach of Nielson and Jung in such a way that it can be used for interactive particle tracing in large data sets of steady flow simulation experiments. This will be achieved by sophisticated preprocessing using additional memory. For further visual enhancement of the streamline we construct an implicitly defined smooth Bézier curve that is used for ray tracing. This allows us to visualize additional scalar values of the simulation as attributes to the trajectory and enables the display of high‐quality smooth curves without creating any visualization geometry and providing a good impression of the spatial situation at the same time. ACM CSS: I.3.3 Computer Graphics—Line and curve generation; I .3.7 Computer Graphics—Raytracing; G.1.2 Numerical Analysis—Spline and piecewise polynomial approximation     

Active set truncated-Newton algorithm for simultaneous optimization of distillation column

An active set truncated-Newton algorithm (ASTNA) is proposed to solve the large-scale bound constrained sub-problems. The global convergence of the algorithm is obtained and two groups of numerical experiments are made for the various large-scale problems of varying size. The comparison results between ASTNA and the subspace limited memory quasi-Newton algorithm and between the modified augmented Lagrange multiplier methods combined with ASTNA and the modified barrier function method show the stability and effectiveness of ASTNA for simultaneous optimization of distillation column.     

Seeking the truth about ad hoc join costs

In this paper, we re-examine the results of prior work on methods for computing ad hoc joins. We develop a detailed cost model for predicting join algorithm performance, and we use the model to develop cost formulas for the major ad hoc join methods found in the relational database literature. We show that various pieces of “common wisdom” about join algorithm performance fail to hold up when analyzed carefully, and we use our detailed cost model to derive op timal buffer allocation schemes for each of the join methods examined here. We show that optimizing their buffer allocations can lead to large performance improvements, e.g., as much as a 400% improvement in some cases. We also validate our cost model's predictions by measuring an actual implementation of each join algorithm considered. The results of this work should be directly useful to implementors of relational query optimizers and query processing systems. Edited by M. Adiba. Received May 1993 / Accepted April 1996     

寻找非构造油气藏的新思路

目前,一种新的理论体系和研究方法已经形成,并正在发展和逐步完善。那就是层序地层学和油气成藏系统理论的诞生和发展;以及由计算机的快速发展带动起来的地震测井资料的采集、处理、显示和各种地质问题的计算机模拟技术,使得地质学和石油地质学都在朝着从定性到定量,从推测到更科学的预测方向发展。在今后的5～10年中,中国的石油地质家们不仅要注意方法和技术方面的进步,还应当重视在陆相层序地层学和陆相层序中油气成藏机制等基本理论方面的研究。     

The formalization and analysis of a communications protocol

The MSMIE protocol [SBC89] allows processors in a distributed system to communicate via shared memory. It was designed to meet the reliability and efficiency needs of applications such as nuclear safety systems. We present a formal model of the MSMIE protocol expressed in the notation CCS. Desirable properties of the protocol are expressed in the modal mu-calculus, an expressive modal logic. We show that the protocol lacks an important liveness property. In actual operation, additional operating constraints are checked to avoid potential problems. We present a modified protocol and show that it possesses the liveness property even without checking operating constraints. We also show how parts of the analysis were automated with the Concurrency Workbench.     

符号运算在求解车辆传动系扭振中的应用

介绍符号运算方法在用拉普拉斯变换方法求解车辆传动系扭振过程中的作用．针对弹性联轴器的匹配计算，给出了具体求解实例．实践表明，与传统的纯数值计算方法相比，符号运算方法可以方便准确地处理车辆传动系统扭振分析中的非线性等复杂问题，具有推广应用价值．