Abstract: Due to limited areas and excessive cost of land for projects, backfilling process has become necessary. Also, backfilling will be done to overcome the un-leveling depths or raising levels of site construction, especially near the sea region. Therefore, backfilling soil materials used under the foundation of structures should be investigated regarding its effect on ground motion characteristics, especially at regions subjected to earthquakes. In this research, 60-meter thickness of sandy fill material was used above a fixed 240-meter of natural clayey soil underlying by rock formation to predict the modified ground motion characteristics effect at the foundation level. Comparison between the effect of using three different situations of fill material compaction on the recorded earthquake is studied, i.e. peak ground acceleration, time history, and spectra acceleration values. The three different densities of the compacted fill material used in the study were very loose, medium dense and very dense sand deposits, respectively. Shake computer program was used to perform this study. Strong earthquake records, with Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) of 0.35 g, were used in the analysis. It was found that, higher compaction of fill material thickness has a significant effect on eliminating the earthquake ground motion properties at surface layer of fill material, near foundation level. It is recommended to consider the fill material characteristics in the design of foundations subjected to seismic motions. Future studies should be analyzed for different fill and natural soil deposits for different seismic conditions.
Abstract: This paper studies the free-field response by adopting a flexible membrane container as soil boundary for experimental shaking table tests. The influence of the soil container boundary on the soil behaviour and the dynamic soil properties under seismic effect were examined. A flexible container with 1/50 scale factor was adopted in the experimental tests, including construction, instrumentation, and determination of the results of dynamic tests on a shaking table. Horizontal face displacements and accelerations were analysed to determine the influence of the container boundary on the performance of the soil. The outputs results show that the flexible boundary container allows more displacement and larger accelerations. The soil in a rigid wall container cannot deform as similar as the soil in the real field does. Therefore, the response of flexible container tested is believed to be more reliable for soil boundary than that in the rigid container.
Abstract: Local irregular topography has a great impact on earthquake ground motion. For scarp topography, using numerical simulation method, the influence extent and scope of the scarp terrain on scarp's upside and downside ground motion are discussed in case of different vertical incident SV waves. The results show that: (1) The amplification factor of scarp's upside region is greater than that of the free surface, while the amplification factor of scarp's downside part is less than that of the free surface; (2) When the slope angle increases, for x component, amplification factors of the scarp upside also increase, while the downside part decrease with it. For z component, both of the upside and downside amplification factors will increase; (3) When the slope angle changes, the influence scope of scarp's downside part is almost unchanged, but for the upside part, it slightly becomes greater with the increase of slope angle; (4) Due to the existence of the scarp, the z component ground motion appears at the surface. Its amplification factor increases for larger slope angle, and the peaks of the surface responses are related with incident waves. However, the input wave has little effects on the x component amplification factors.
Abstract: Building structures are subjected to both horizontal and vertical ground motions during earthquakes, but only the horizontal ground motion has been extensively studied and considered in design. Most of the prevailing seismic codes assume the vertical component to be 1/2 to 2/3 of the horizontal one. In order to understand the building responses from vertical ground motions, many earthquakes records are studied in this paper. System identification methods (ARX Model) are used to analyze the strong motions and to find out the characteristics of the vertical amplification factors and the natural frequencies of buildings. Analysis results show that the vertical amplification factors for high-rise buildings and low-rise building are 1.78 and 2.52 respectively, and the average vertical amplification factor of all buildings is about 2. The relationship between the vertical natural frequency and building height was regressed to a suggested formula in this study. The result points out an important message; the taller the building is, the greater chance of resonance of vertical vibration on the building will be.
Abstract: Shavadoon is a type of underground living space, formerly used in urban residences of Dezful and Shooshtar cities in southwestern Iran. In spite of their high efficiency in creating cool spaces for hot summers of that area, Shavadoons were abandoned, like many other components of vernacular architecture, as a result of the modernism movement. However, Shavadoons were used by the local people as shelters during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war, and although several cases of bombardment happened during those years, no case of damage was reported in those two cities. On this basis, and regarding the high seismicity of Iran, the use of Shavadoons as post-disasters shelters can be considered as a good issue for research. This paper presents the results of a thorough study conducted on these spaces and their seismic behavior. First, the architectural aspects of Shavadoon and their construction technique are presented. Then, the results of seismic evaluation of a sample Shavadoon, conducted by a series of time history analyses, using Plaxis software and a set of selected earthquakes, are briefly explained. These results show that Shavadoons have good stability against seismic excitations. This stability is mainly because of the high strength of conglomerate materials inside which the Shavadoons have been excavated. On this basis, and considering other merits of this components of vernacular architecture in southwest of Iran, it is recommended that the revival of these components is seriously reconsidered by both architects and civil engineers.
Abstract: The rapidly diminishing fossil fuel reserves, their exorbitant cost and the increasingly apparent negative effect of fossil fuels to climate changes is a wake-up call to explore renewable energy. Wind, bio-fuel and solar power have already become staples of Kenyan electricity mix. The potential of electric power generation from marine tidal currents is enormous, with oceans covering more than 70% of the earth. However, attempts to harness marine tidal energy in Kenya, has yet to be studied thoroughly due to its promising, cyclic, reliable and predictable nature and the vast energy contained within it. The high load factors resulting from the fluid properties and the predictable resource characteristics make marine currents particularly attractive for power generation and advantageous when compared to others. Global-level resource assessments and oceanographic literature and data have been compiled in an analysis of the technology-specific requirements for tidal energy technologies and the physical resources. Temporal variations in resource intensity as well as the differences between small-scale applications are considered.
Abstract: This paper posits the need to take a cross-cultural approach to communication with non-human cultures and intelligences in order to meet the following three imminent contingencies: communicating with sentient biological intelligences, communicating with extraterrestrial intelligences, and communicating with artificial super-intelligences. The paper begins with a discussion of how intelligence emerges. It disputes some common assumptions we maintain about consciousness, intention, and language. The paper next explores cross-cultural communication among humans, including non-sapiens species. The next argument made is that we need to become much more serious about communicating with the non-human, intelligent life forms that already exist around us here on Earth. There is an urgent need to broaden our definition of communication and reach out to the other sentient life forms that inhabit our world. The paper next examines the science and philosophy behind CETI (communication with extraterrestrial intelligences) and how it has proven useful, even in the absence of contact with alien life. However, CETI’s assumptions and methodology need to be revised and based on the cross-cultural approach to communication proposed in this paper if we are truly serious about finding and communicating with life beyond Earth. The final theme explored in this paper is communication with non-biological super-intelligences using a cross-cultural communication approach. This will present a serious challenge for humanity, as we have never been truly compelled to converse with other species, and our failure to seriously consider such intercourse has left us largely unprepared to deal with communication in a future that will be mediated and controlled by computer algorithms. Fortunately, our experience dealing with other human cultures can provide us with a framework for this communication. The basic assumptions behind intercultural communication can be applied to the many types of communication envisioned in this paper if we are willing to recognize that we are in fact dealing with other cultures when we interact with other species, alien life, and artificial super-intelligence. The ideas considered in this paper will require a new mindset for humanity, but a new disposition will prepare us to face the challenges posed by a future dominated by artificial intelligence.
Abstract: Supply Chain Resilience has been broadly studied during the last decade, focusing the research on many aspects of Supply Chain performance. Consequently, different definitions of Supply Chain Resilience have been developed by the research community, drawing inspiration also from other fields of study such as ecology, sociology, psychology, economy et al. This way, the definitions so far developed in the extant literature are therefore very heterogeneous, and many authors have pointed out a lack of consensus in this field of analysis. The aim of this research is to find common points between these definitions, through the development of a framework of study: the Resilience Triangle. The Resilience Triangle is a tool developed in the field of civil engineering, with the objective of modeling the loss of resilience of a given structure during and after the occurrence of a disruption such as an earthquake. The Resilience Triangle is a simple yet powerful tool: in our opinion, it can summarize all the features that authors have captured in the Supply Chain Resilience definitions over the years. This research intends to recapitulate within this framework all these heterogeneities in Supply Chain Resilience research. After collecting a various number of Supply Chain Resilience definitions present in the extant literature, the methodology approach provides a taxonomy step with the scope of collecting and analyzing all the data gathered. The next step provides the comparison of the data obtained with the plotting of a disruption profile, in order to contextualize the Resilience Triangle in the Supply Chain context. The tool and the results developed in this research will allow to lay the foundation for future Supply Chain Resilience modeling and measurement work.
Abstract: One of the main drawbacks of the Modal Pushover Analysis (MPA) is the need to perform nonlinear time-history analysis, which complicates the analysis method and time. A simplified version of the MPA has been proposed based on the concept of the inelastic deformation ratio. Furthermore, the effect of the higher modes of vibration is considered by assuming linearly-elastic responses, which enables the use of standard elastic response spectrum analysis. In this thesis, the simplified MPA (SMPA) method is applied to determine the target global drift and the inter-story drifts of steel frame building. The effect of the higher vibration modes is considered within the framework of the SMPA. A comprehensive survey about the inelastic deformation ratio is presented. After that, a suitable expression from literature is selected for the inelastic deformation ratio and then implemented in the SMPA. The estimated seismic demands using the SMPA, such as target drift, base shear, and the inter-story drifts, are compared with the seismic responses determined by applying the standard MPA. The accuracy of the estimated seismic demands is validated by comparing with the results obtained by the nonlinear time-history analysis using real earthquake records.
Abstract: Fragility curve is an effective common used tool to determine the earthquake performance of structural and nonstructural components. Also, it is used to determine the nonlinear behavior of bridges. There are many historical bridges in the Turkish railway network; the earthquake performances of these bridges are needed to be investigated. To derive fragility curve Intensity measures (IMs) and Engineering demand parameters (EDP) are needed to be determined. And the relation between IMs and EDP are needed to be derived. In this study, a typical simply supported steel girder riveted railway bridge is studied. Fragility curves of this bridge are derived by two parameters lognormal distribution. Time history analyses are done for selected 60 real earthquake data to determine the relation between IMs and EDP. Moreover, efficiency, practicality, and sufficiency of three different IMs are discussed. PGA, Sa(0.2s) and Sa(1s), the most common used IMs parameters for fragility curve in the literature, are taken into consideration in terms of efficiency, practicality and sufficiency.
Abstract: Sustainability starts with conserving resources for future generations. Since human’s existence on this earth, he has been consuming natural resources. The resource consumption pace in the past was very slow, but industrialization in 18th century brought a change in the human lifestyle. New inventions and discoveries upgraded the human workforce to machines. The mass manufacture of goods provided easy access to products. In the last few decades, the globalization and change in technologies brought consumer oriented market. The consumption of resources has increased at a very high scale. This overconsumption pattern brought economic boom and provided multiple opportunities, but it also put stress on the natural resources. This paper tries to put forth the facts and figures of the population growth and consumption of resources with examples. This is explained with the help of the mathematical expression of doubling known as exponential growth. It compares the carrying capacity of the earth and resource consumption of humans’ i.e. ecological footprint and bio-capacity. Further, it presents the need to conserve natural resources and re-examine sustainable resource use approach for sustainability.
Abstract: In the present research, various formulations of wavelet transform are applied on acceleration time history of earthquake. The mentioned transforms decompose the strong ground motion into low and high frequency parts. Since the high frequency portion of strong ground motion has a minor effect on dynamic response of structures, the structure is excited by low frequency part. Consequently, the seismic response of structure is predicted consuming one half of computational time, comparing with conventional time history analysis. Towards reducing the computational effort needed in seismic optimization of structure, seismic optimization of a shear frame structure is conducted by applying various forms of mentioned transformation through genetic algorithm.
Abstract: NASA, ESA, and NSSC space agencies have plans to put planetary rovers on Mars in 2020. For these future planetary rovers to succeed, they will heavily depend on sensors to detect obstacles. This will also become of vital importance in the future, if rovers become less dependent on commands received from earth-based control and more dependent on self-configuration and self-decision making. These planetary rovers will face harsh environments and the possibility of hardware failure is high, as seen in missions from the past. In this paper, we focus on using Autonomic principles where self-healing, self-optimization, and self-adaption are explored using the MAPE-K model and expanding this model to encapsulate the attributes such as Awareness, Analysis, and Adjustment (AAA-3). In the experimentation, a Pioneer P3-DX research robot is used to simulate a planetary rover. The sonar sensors on the P3-DX robot are used to simulate the sensors on a planetary rover (even though in reality, sonar sensors cannot operate in a vacuum). Experiments using the P3-DX robot focus on how our software system can be adapted with the loss of sonar sensor functionality. The autonomic manager system is responsible for the decision making on how to make use of remaining ‘enabled’ sonars sensors to compensate for those sonar sensors that are ‘disabled’. The key to this research is that the robot can still detect objects even with reduced sonar sensor capability.
Abstract: Green planet is one of the Earth’s names which is known as a terrestrial planet and also can be named the fifth largest planet of the solar system as another scientific interpretation. Plants do not have a constant and steady distribution all around the world, and even plant species’ variations are not the same in one specific region. Presence of plants is not only limited to one field like botany; they exist in different fields such as literature and mythology and they hold useful and inestimable historical records. No one can imagine the world without oxygen which is produced mostly by plants. Their influences become more manifest since no other live species can exist on earth without plants as they form the basic food staples too. Regulation of water cycle and oxygen production are the other roles of plants. The roles affect environment and climate. Plants are the main components of agricultural activities. Many countries benefit from these activities. Therefore, plants have impacts on political and economic situations and future of countries. Due to importance of plants and their roles, study of plants is essential in various fields. Consideration of their different applications leads to focus on details of them too. Automatic recognition of plants is a novel field to contribute other researches and future of studies. Moreover, plants can survive their life in different places and regions by means of adaptations. Therefore, adaptations are their special factors to help them in hard life situations. Weather condition is one of the parameters which affect plants life and their existence in one area. Recognition of plants in different weather conditions is a new window of research in the field. Only natural images are usable to consider weather conditions as new factors. Thus, it will be a generalized and useful system. In order to have a general system, distance from the camera to plants is considered as another factor. The other considered factor is change of light intensity in environment as it changes during the day. Adding these factors leads to a huge challenge to invent an accurate and secure system. Development of an efficient plant recognition system is essential and effective. One important component of plant is leaf which can be used to implement automatic systems for plant recognition without any human interface and interaction. Due to the nature of used images, characteristic investigation of plants is done. Leaves of plants are the first characteristics to select as trusty parts. Four different plant species are specified for the goal to classify them with an accurate system. The current paper is devoted to principal directions of the proposed methods and implemented system, image dataset, and results. The procedure of algorithm and classification is explained in details. First steps, feature detection and description of visual information, are outperformed by using Scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), HARRIS-SIFT, and FAST-SIFT methods. The accuracy of the implemented methods is computed. In addition to comparison, robustness and efficiency of results in different conditions are investigated and explained.
Abstract: In this study, the mechanical model of various anchors embedded in gypsum board subjected cyclic shear loading were investigated. Shear tests for anchors embedded in 200 mm square size gypsum board were conducted to measure the load - load displacement curves. The strength of the gypsum board was changed for three conditions and 12 kinds of anchors were selected which were ordinary used for gypsum board anchoring. The loading conditions were a monotonous loading and a cyclic loading controlled by a servo-controlled hydraulic loading system to achieve accurate measurement. The fracture energy for each of the anchors was estimated by the analysis of consumed energy calculated by the load - load displacement curve. The effect of the strength of gypsum board and the types of anchors on the shear properties of gypsum board anchors was cleared. A numerical model to predict the load-unload curve of shear deformation of gypsum board anchors caused by such as the earthquake load was proposed and the validity on the model was proved.
Abstract: This paper is to formulate a mathematical model to predict the amounts of the emissions produced from the combustion process of the gas turbine unit of the jet engine. These emissions have bad impacts on the environment if they are out of standards, which cause real threats to all type of life on the earth. The amounts of the emissions from the gas turbine engine are functions to many operational and design factors. In landing-takeoff (LTO) these amounts are not the same as in taxi or cruise of the plane using jet engines, because of the difference in the activity period during these operating modes. These emissions can be affected by several physical and chemical variables, such as fuel type, fuel to air ratio or equivalence ratio, flame temperature, combustion pressure, in addition to some inlet conditions such as ambient temperature and air humidity. To study the influence of these variables on the amounts of these emissions during the combustion process in the gas turbine unit, a computer program has been developed by using the visual basic 6 software. Here, the analysis of the combustion process is carried out by considering it as a chemical reaction with shifting equilibrium to find the products of the combustion of the octane fuel, at different equivalence ratios, compressor pressure ratios (CPR) and combustion temperatures. The results obtained have shown that there is noticeable influence of the equivalence ratio, CPR, and the combustion temperature on the amounts of the main emissions which are considered pollutants, such as CO, CO2 and NO.
Abstract: The method selected for the design of structures not only can affect their seismic vulnerability but also can affect their construction cost. For the design of steel structures, two distinct methods have been introduced by existing codes, namely allowable stress design (ASD) and load resistant factor design (LRFD). This study investigates the effect of using the aforementioned design methods on the seismic vulnerability and construction cost of steel structures. Specifically, a 20-story building equipped with special moment resisting frame and an eccentrically braced system was selected for this study. The building was designed for three different intensities of peak ground acceleration including 0.2 g, 0.25 g, and 0.3 g using the ASD and LRFD methods. The required sizes of beams, columns, and braces were obtained using response spectrum analysis. Then, the designed frames were subjected to nine natural earthquake records which were scaled to the designed response spectrum. For each frame, the base shear, story shears, and inter-story drifts were calculated and then were compared. Results indicated that the LRFD method led to a more economical design for the frames. In addition, the LRFD method resulted in lower base shears and larger inter-story drifts when compared with the ASD method. It was concluded that the application of the LRFD method not only reduced the weights of structural elements but also provided a higher safety margin against seismic actions when compared with the ASD method.
Abstract: Cloud Computing is a convenient model for on-demand networks that uses shared pools of virtual configurable computing resources, such as servers, networks, storage devices, applications, etc. The cloud serves as an environment for companies and organizations to use infrastructure resources without making any purchases and they can access such resources wherever and whenever they need. Cloud computing is useful to overcome a number of problems in various Information Technology (IT) domains such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Scientific Research, e-Governance Systems, Decision Support Systems, ERP, Web Application Development, Mobile Technology, etc. Companies can use Cloud Computing services to store large amounts of data that can be accessed from anywhere on Earth and also at any time. Such services are rented by the client companies where the actual rent depends upon the amount of data stored on the cloud and also the amount of processing power used in a given time period. The resources offered by the cloud service companies are flexible in the sense that the user companies can increase or decrease their storage requirements or the processing power requirements at any time, thus minimizing the overall rental cost of the service they receive. In addition, the Cloud Computing service providers offer fast processors and applications software that can be shared by their clients. This is especially important for small companies with limited budgets which cannot afford to purchase their own expensive hardware and software. This paper is an overview of the Cloud Computing, giving its types, principles, advantages, and disadvantages. In addition, the paper gives some example engineering applications of Cloud Computing and makes suggestions for possible future applications in the field of engineering.
Abstract: The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has been a very successful project in determining math redistribution within the Earth system. Large deformations caused by earthquakes are in the high frequency band. Unfortunately, GRACE is only capable to provide reliable estimate at the low-to-medium frequency band for the gravitational changes. In this study, we computed the gravity changes after the 2012 Mw8.6 Indian Ocean earthquake off-Sumatra using the GRACE Level-2 monthly spherical harmonic (SH) solutions released by the University of Texas Center for Space Research (UTCSR). Moreover, we calculated gravity changes using different fault models derived from teleseismic data. The model predictions showed non-negligible discrepancies in gravity changes. However, after removing high-frequency signals, using Gaussian filtering 350 km commensurable GRACE spatial resolution, the discrepancies vanished, and the spatial patterns of total gravity changes predicted from all slip models became similar at the spatial resolution attainable by GRACE observations, and predicted-gravity changes were consistent with the GRACE-detected gravity changes. Nevertheless, the fault models, in which give different slip amplitudes, proportionally lead to different amplitude in the predicted gravity changes.
Abstract: Power failure resulting from tower collapse due to violent seismic events might bring enormous and inestimable losses. The Chi-Chi earthquake, for example, strongly struck Taiwan and caused huge damage to the power system on September 21, 1999. Nearly 10% of extra high voltage (EHV) transmission towers were damaged in the earthquake. Therefore, seismic hazards of EHV transmission towers should be monitored and evaluated. The ultimate goal of this study is to establish a damage level assessment model for EHV transmission towers. The data of earthquakes provided by Taiwan Central Weather Bureau serve as a reference and then lay the foundation for earthquake simulations and analyses afterward. Some parameters related to the damage level of each point of an EHV tower are simulated and analyzed by the data from monitoring stations once an earthquake occurs. Through the Fourier transform, the seismic wave is then analyzed and transformed into different wave frequencies, and the data would be shown through a response spectrum. With this method, the seismic frequency which damages EHV towers the most is clearly identified. An estimation model is built to determine the damage level caused by a future seismic event. Finally, instead of relying on visual observation done by inspectors, the proposed model can provide a power company with the damage information of a transmission tower. Using the model, manpower required by visual observation can be reduced, and the accuracy of the damage level estimation can be substantially improved. Such a model is greatly useful for health and construction monitoring because of the advantages of long-term evaluation of structural characteristics and long-term damage detection.