Influence of the Tunnel Shape on Shotcrete Lining Stresses

Tunnel excavation is frequently carried out in rock masses by the drill and blast method and the final shape of the tunnel boundary can be irregular due to overbreaks. In order to investigate the effects of overbreaks a study of the effect of tunnel boundary irregularity has been carried out. This is done developing a computational tool able to take into account fuzzy variables (i.e., thickness of the beams of the bedded spring approach used for the model). The obtained results show that irregularity effects should be considered when a shotcrete lining is used as the final tunnel lining (for the case where the tunneling procedure does not permit a smooth surface to be obtained). This is crucial to obtain a durable linin

Statistical Mechanics and Information-Theoretic Perspectives on Complexity in the Earth System

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Identifying Overlapping and Hierarchical Thematic Structures in Networks of Scholarly Papers: A Comparison of Three Approaches

We implemented three recently proposed approaches to the identification of overlapping and hierarchical substructures in graphs and applied the corresponding algorithms to a network of 492 information-science papers coupled via their cited sources. The thematic substructures obtained and overlaps produced by the three hierarchical cluster algorithms were compared to a content-based categorisation, which we based on the interpretation of titles and keywords. We defined sets of papers dealing with three topics located on different levels of aggregation: h-index, webometrics, and bibliometrics. We identified these topics with branches in the dendrograms produced by the three cluster algorithms and compared the overlapping topics they detected with one another and with the three pre-defined paper sets. We discuss the advantages and drawbacks of applying the three approaches to paper networks in research fields.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure

Evolutionary-based sparse regression for the experimental identification of duffing oscillator

In this paper, an evolutionary-based sparse regression algorithm is proposed and applied onto experimental data collected from a Duffing oscillator setup and numerical simulation data. Our purpose is to identify the Coulomb friction terms as part of the ordinary differential equation of the system. Correct identification of this nonlinear system using sparse identification is hugely dependent on selecting the correct form of nonlinearity included in the function library. Consequently, in this work, the evolutionary-based sparse identification is replacing the need for user knowledge when constructing the library in sparse identification. Constructing the library based on the data-driven evolutionary approach is an effective way to extend the space of nonlinear functions, allowing for the sparse regression to be applied on an extensive space of functions. The results show that the method provides an effective algorithm for the purpose of unveiling the physical nature of the Duffing oscillator. In addition, the robustness of the identification algorithm is investigated for various levels of noise in simulation. The proposed method has possible applications to other nonlinear dynamic systems in mechatronics, robotics, and electronics