Compressive behavior of masonry columns confined with steel reinforced grout (SRG) composite

In this study, a new type of composite comprised of steel fiber cords embedded in a natural hydraulic lime mortar matrix, known as steel reinforced grout (SRG), is explored for the use in confinement of masonry columns. An experimental study was carried out to understand the behavior of solid clay brick masonry columns confined by SRG jackets. Twenty-four confined and seven unconfined columns with a square cross-section were tested to failure under a monotonic concentric compressive load. Test parameters considered were the column corner condition, number of fiber jacket layers, and number of fiber overlapping faces. SRG confinement improved the compressive strength, ultimate axial strain, and energy absorption of the masonry columns relative to the unconfined condition. Results showed that increasing the number of fiber layers increased the confined compressive strength, however the increase in confined strength was not proportional to the number of fiber layers. Rounding the column corners slightly increased the confined compressive strength. Increasing the number of fiber overlapping faces also increased the confined compressive strength. Models from the literature for FRP-confined masonry were examined for their applicability to predict the strength increase from SRG jackets. Considering the specimens included in this thesis work and supplemented with others collected from the literature, it was found that the model for the Italian CNR-DT 200 provided the closest predictions of the increase in compressive strength provided by the SRG jacket (within 33% of the experimental values). More work is needed to improve the predictions of the increase in compressive strength provided by SRG jackets and to predict the ultimate strain in the jacket --Abstract, page iii

The Sword, October 2011

Contents Front Page Fall Fun News Blue Plus Gold Does Not Equal Green What Does the Disability Services Office Do? A Long Road to Ruin: Road Construction Continues to Complicate Commutes Don\u27t Ask, Don\u27t Tell Repealed New Cadaver Lab on Campus A New Year, A New Senate: A Message from Student Senate President Ries\u27 First Four Months in Office The Fandrei is Freezing Arts and Variety Wilco, The Whole Love Album Review Fall Concert 2011: Concert Band, String Ensemble, and Percussion Ensemble Battle of the Tea Bars The Uptowner Cafe Book Reviews: The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown and The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster Take a Trip to Transylvania Strings Attached Hitting the Right Chord Golden Bear Artist Spotlight: Mina Souvannasoth Sports Hendrickson Anchors Bears O-Line Consistency Drives Women\u27s Golf Team to a Strong Season New Faces Key to Success for Golden Bear Soccer Volleyball Season Update: Golden Bears Continue Dominance of NSIC Columns Dear Chloe: The best life advice you\u27ll ever get

Congruence and Metrical Invariants of Zonotopes

Zonotopes are studied from the point of view of central symmetry and how volumes of facets and the angles between them determine a zonotope uniquely. New proofs are given for theorems of Shephard and McMullen characterizing a zonotope by the central symmetry of faces of a fixed dimension. When a zonotope is regarded as the Minkowski sum of line segments determined by the columns of a defining matrix, the product of the transpose of that matrix and the matrix acts as a shape matrix containing information about the edges of the zonotope and the angles between them. Congruence between zonotopes is determined by equality of shape matrices. This condition is used, together with volume computations for zonotopes and their facets, to obtain results about rigidity and about the uniqueness of a zonotope given arbitrary normal-vector and facet-volume data. These provide direct proofs in the case of zonotopes of more general theorems of Alexandrov on the rigidity of convex polytopes, and Minkowski on the uniqueness of convex polytopes given certain normal-vector and facet-volume data. For a zonotope, this information is encoded in the next-to-highest exterior power of the defining matrix.Comment: 23 pages (typeface increased to 12pts). Errors corrected include proofs of 1.5, 3.5, and 3.8. Comments welcom

Between the Columns Newsletter: Spring 2010

Table of Contents More than Walls: Building the Noel Studio Team (p. 1) Message from the Dean (p. 2) Kindles and iPods: Your On-the-Go Reading Alternatives (p. 2) LibStart: Library Tour Program (p. 2) Txt Ur Lib (p. 2) An Evening on the Quilt Trail with Friends (p. 3) EKU Libraries 2010 Board Members (p. 3) New Resources (p. 4) SGA Popular DVD Collection (p. 5) Staff Highlights (p. 5) Adventures in Copyright: Movies and Public Viewing Rights (p. 5) Getting to Noah Webster? (p. 6) Experience the Studio...Be the Difference (p. 6) Spring Library Hours (p. 6) Between the Columns: Student Inspired Design (p. 7) Spring 2010 Featured Events (p. 7) The Faces Behind the Service: the Library School Associates (p. 8

Between the Columns Newsletter: Spring 2010

Table of Contents More than Walls: Building the Noel Studio Team (p. 1) Message from the Dean (p. 2) Kindles and iPods: Your On-the-Go Reading Alternatives (p. 2) LibStart: Library Tour Program (p. 2) Txt Ur Lib (p. 2) An Evening on the Quilt Trail with Friends (p. 3) EKU Libraries 2010 Board Members (p. 3) New Resources (p. 4) SGA Popular DVD Collection (p. 5) Staff Highlights (p. 5) Adventures in Copyright: Movies and Public Viewing Rights (p. 5) Getting to Noah Webster? (p. 6) Experience the Studio...Be the Difference (p. 6) Spring Library Hours (p. 6) Between the Columns: Student Inspired Design (p. 7) Spring 2010 Featured Events (p. 7) The Faces Behind the Service: the Library School Associates (p. 8

THE EFFECT OF CORE ARCHITECTURE ON THE BEHAVIOUR OF SANDWICH COLUMNS UNDER EDGEWISE COMPRESSION LOADING

ABSTRACT Sandwich structures are a form of construction that offers high performance and low-weight. This type of construction became popular by the mid of the twenty century where different metallic faces and core materials were used for the construction of aircrafts and marine vessels. The development of high-strength, high-modulus, light-weight fibres and new forms of core materials has opened a new horizon for sandwich structures. Using sandwich structures for columns was investigated by different researchers. However, none of the located literature reported using strong-weak core (mixed-core) materials in sandwich columns. To investigate the effect of using mixed-core on the column behaviour was investigated by testing five sets of prototype columns under edgewise compression. The column cores were made of PVC low-density foam, end-grain balsa wood or a combination of both materials. The column skins were laminated by using glass/epoxy composites. The test results showed that the mixed-core can lead to having a failure mode that has not been reported previously. This paper presents the experimental work conducted in testing these columns. It highlights the effect of core structure on the failure mode and capacity of the sandwich columns

Cubic Polyhedra

A cubic polyhedron is a polyhedral surface whose edges are exactly all the edges of the cubic lattice. Every such polyhedron is a discrete minimal surface, and it appears that many (but not all) of them can be relaxed to smooth minimal surfaces (under an appropriate smoothing flow, keeping their symmetries). Here we give a complete classification of the cubic polyhedra. Among these are five new infinite uniform polyhedra and an uncountable collection of new infinite semi-regular polyhedra. We also consider the somewhat larger class of all discrete minimal surfaces in the cubic lattice.Comment: 18 pages, many figure

A matrix solution to pentagon equation with anticommuting variables

We construct a solution to pentagon equation with anticommuting variables living on two-dimensional faces of tetrahedra. In this solution, matrix coordinates are ascribed to tetrahedron vertices. As matrix multiplication is noncommutative, this provides a "more quantum" topological field theory than in our previous works

On the Geometric Interpretation of the Nonnegative Rank

The nonnegative rank of a nonnegative matrix is the minimum number of nonnegative rank-one factors needed to reconstruct it exactly. The problem of determining this rank and computing the corresponding nonnegative factors is difficult; however it has many potential applications, e.g., in data mining, graph theory and computational geometry. In particular, it can be used to characterize the minimal size of any extended reformulation of a given combinatorial optimization program. In this paper, we introduce and study a related quantity, called the restricted nonnegative rank. We show that computing this quantity is equivalent to a problem in polyhedral combinatorics, and fully characterize its computational complexity. This in turn sheds new light on the nonnegative rank problem, and in particular allows us to provide new improved lower bounds based on its geometric interpretation. We apply these results to slack matrices and linear Euclidean distance matrices and obtain counter-examples to two conjectures of Beasly and Laffey, namely we show that the nonnegative rank of linear Euclidean distance matrices is not necessarily equal to their dimension, and that the rank of a matrix is not always greater than the nonnegative rank of its square