Abstract: Built-up columns have been widely employed by practice engineers in the design and construction of buildings and bridges. However, failures have been observed in this type of columns in previous seismic events. This study analyses the performance of built-up columns with different configurations of battens when it is subjected to seismic loads. Four columns with different size of battens were simulated and subjected to three different intensities of axial load along with a lateral cyclic load. Results indicate that the size of battens influences significantly the seismic behavior of columns. Lower shear capacity of battens results in higher ultimate strength and ductility for built-up columns. It is observed that intensity of axial load has a significant effect on the ultimate strength of columns, but it is less influential on the yield strength. For a given drift value, the stress level in the centroid of smaller size battens is significantly more than that of larger size battens signifying damage concentration in battens rather than chords. It is concluded that design of battens for shear demand lower than code specified values only slightly reduces initial stiffness of columns; however, it improves seismic performance of battened columns.
Abstract: Chord formation in western music notations is an intelligent art form which is learnt over the years by a musician to acquire it. Still it is a question of creativity that brings the perfect chord sequence that matches music score. This work focuses on the process of forming chords using a custom-designed knowledgebase (KB) of Music Expert System. An optimal Chord-Set for a given music score is arrived by using the chord-pool in the KB and the finding the chord match using Jusic Distance (JD). Conceptual Graph based knowledge representation model is followed for knowledge storage and retrieval in the knowledgebase.
Abstract: A chord of a simple polygon P is a line segment [xy]
that intersects the boundary of P only at both endpoints x and y. A
chord of P is called an interior chord provided the interior of [xy] lies
in the interior of P. P is weakly visible from [xy] if for every point v
in P there exists a point w in [xy] such that [vw] lies in P. In this
paper star-shaped, L-convex, and convex polygons are characterized
in terms of weak visibility properties from internal chords and starshaped
subsets of P. A new Krasnoselskii-type characterization of
isothetic star-shaped polygons is also presented.