18,169 research outputs found
About the freedom of free forms
p. 907-913This paper deals with the arrival of freedom at the world of structures giving birth a new
generation of forms: the free forms. Its purpose is to analyze, to discuss and to comment
critically this singular fact as well as their implications on the designers' task. It is more a
philosophical than a technical paper.
For centuries man has imagined new forms for their structures but he has not been always able to analyze and to build them. Before the arrival of the electronic calculus, the
representation and analysis of structural forms could be limited to those ones belonging to
the Euclidean Geometry. The computers broke those limitations and they gave wide
freedom to the designers to conceive a new generation of forms; these new forms were
called "free forms".
Nowadays any form imagined can be represented, it can be analyzed and it can be built.
Nevertheless not any imagined form can become a structural free form. Perhaps it could be a beautiful sculptural form, but not necessarily a structural one. For being a structural form, the inescapable laws of the mechanics must be satisfied. Moreover a structural free form can become an architectural free form just only when aesthetical, functional, environmental and social requirements, among others, are accomplished.
Freedom has widened the horizons of creativity for the designers' task. Simultaneously new responsibilities have come altogether with this freedom. Today free form designers face permanent challenges; designers must be familiar with the menus of new and multiple tools created by the modern technology and they must be trained to make the right use of them.
They must handle those wide menus in order to select the most appropriated options to
generate, to model and to analyze the new free forms. At the same time they must select the most appropriated new materials and techniques to build these free forms. Finally, designer must be fully conscious of the high impact of their engineering and architectural works on the people and physical environment without forgetting their commitment to the society.Andres, OA. (2010). About the freedom of free forms. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/695
The Vector Curvaton
We analyze a massive vector field with a non-canonical kinetic term in the
action, minimally coupled to gravity, where the mass and kinetic function of
the vector field vary as functions of time during inflation. The vector field
is introduced following the same idea of a scalar curvaton, which must not
affect the inflationary dynamics since its energy density during inflation is
negligible compared to the total energy density in the Universe. Using this
hypothesis, the vector curvaton will be solely responsible for generating the
primordial curvature perturbation \zeta. We have found that the spectra of the
vector field perturbations are scale-invariant in superhorizon scales due to
the suitable choice of the time dependence of the kinetic function and the
effective mass during inflation. The preferred direction, generated by the
vector field, makes the spectrum of \zeta depend on the wavevector, i.e. there
exists statistical anisotropy in \zeta. This is discussed principally in the
case where the mass of the vector field increases with time during inflation,
where it is possible to find a heavy field (M >> H) at the end of inflation,
making the particle production be practically isotropic; thus, the longitudinal
and transverse spectra are nearly the same order which in turn causes that the
statistical anisotropy generated by the vector field is within the
observational bounds.Comment: LaTex file in Aipproc style, 6 pages, no figures. Prepared for the
conference proceedings of the IX Mexican School of the DGFM-SMF: Cosmology
for the XXIst Century. This work is entirely based on Refs. [23-26] and is
the result of Andres A. Navarro's MSc thesi
Crystal structure and electronic states of tripotassium picene
The crystal structure of potassium doped picene with an exact stoichiometry
(K3C22H14, K3picene from here onwards) has been theoretically determined within
Density Functional Theory allowing complete variational freedom of the crystal
structure parameters and the molecular atomic positions. A modified herringbone
lattice is obtained in which potassium atoms are intercalated between two
paired picene molecules displaying the two possible orientations in the
crystal.Along the c-axis, organic molecules alternate with chains formed by
three potassium atoms. The electronic structureof the doped material resembles
pristine picene, except that now the bottom of the conduction band is occupied
by six electrons coming from the ionized K atoms (six per unit cell).
Wavefunctions remain based mainly on picene molecular orbitals getting their
dispersion from intralayer edge to face CH/pi bonding, while eigenenergies have
been modified by the change in the electrostatic potential. The small
dispersion along the c-axis is assigned to small H-H overlap. From the
calculated electronic density of states we expect metallic behavior for
potassium doped picene.Comment: Published version: 8 twocolumn pages, 7 color figures, 2 structural
.cif files include
Sanitation and Externalities: Evidence from Early Childhood Health in Rural India
This paper estimates two sources of benefits, one direct and the other external, related to sanitation infrastructure access on early childhood health: a direct benefit a household receives when moving from open to fixed-point defecation or from unimproved sanitation to improved sanitation, and an external benefit (externality) produced by the neighborhood's access to sanitation infrastructure. Using a sample of children under 48 months in rural areas of India, it finds evidence of positive and significant direct and concave positive external effects
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