13,449 research outputs found
On the Evaluation of the Mechanical Behaviour of Structural Glass Elements
Glass can be considered to be a high-technology engineering material with a
multifunctional potential for structural applications. However, the conventional approach to the use
of glass is often based only on its properties of transparency and isolation. It is thus highly
appropriate and necessary to study the mechanical behaviour of this material and to develop
adequate methods and models leading to its characterisation. It is evident that the great potential of
growth for structural glass applications is an important opportunity of development for the glass
industry and the building/construction sectors. The work presented in this paper is a reflection of
this conclusion. The authors shortly present the state-of-the-art on the application of glass as a
structural element in building and construction, and refer to other potential fields of application and
available glass materials. The experimental procedures and methods adopted in three-point bending
tests performed on 500 × 100 [mm2] float, laminated and tempered glass specimens with
thicknesses between 4 and 19 mm are thoroughly described. The authors evaluated the mechanical
strength and stiffness of glass for structural applications. This work contributes to a deeper
knowledge of the properties of this material
Fitting isochrones to open cluster photometric data III. Estimating metallicities from UBV photometry
The metallicity is a critical parameter that affects the correct
determination fundamental characteristics stellar cluster and has important
implications in Galactic and Stellar evolution research. Fewer than 10 % of the
2174 currently catalog open clusters have their metallicity determined in the
literature. In this work we present a method for estimating the metallicity of
open clusters via non-subjective isochrone fitting using the cross-entropy
global optimization algorithm applied to UBV photometric data. The free
parameters distance, reddening, age, and metallicity simultaneously determined
by the fitting method. The fitting procedure uses weights for the observational
data based on the estimation of membership likelihood for each star, which
considers the observational magnitude limit, the density profile of stars as a
function of radius from the center of the cluster, and the density of stars in
multi-dimensional magnitude space. We present results of [Fe/H] for nine
well-studied open clusters based on 15 distinct UBV data sets. The [Fe/H]
values obtained in the ten cases for which spectroscopic determinations were
available in the literature agree, indicating that our method provides a good
alternative to determining [Fe/H] by using an objective isochrone fitting. Our
results show that the typical precision is about 0.1 dex
A new form of the rotating C-metric
In a previous paper, we showed that the traditional form of the charged
C-metric can be transformed, by a change of coordinates, into one with an
explicitly factorizable structure function. This new form of the C-metric has
the advantage that its properties become much simpler to analyze. In this
paper, we propose an analogous new form for the rotating charged C-metric, with
structure function G(\xi)=(1-\xi^2)(1+r_{+}A\xi)(1+r_{-}A\xi), where r_\pm are
the usual locations of the horizons in the Kerr-Newman black hole. Unlike the
non-rotating case, this new form is not related to the traditional one by a
coordinate transformation. We show that the physical distinction between these
two forms of the rotating C-metric lies in the nature of the conical
singularities causing the black holes to accelerate apart: the new form is free
of torsion singularities and therefore does not contain any closed timelike
curves. We claim that this new form should be considered the natural
generalization of the C-metric with rotation.Comment: 13 pages, LaTe
Tuned liquid dampers simulation for earthquake response control of buildings
This paper is focused on the study of an earthquake protection system, the Tuned Liquid Damper (TLD), which
can, if adequately designed, reduce earthquake demands on buildings. This positive effect is accomplished taking
into account the oscillation of the free surface of a fluid inside a tank (sloshing). The behaviour of an isolated
Tuned Liquid Damper, subjected to a sinusoidal excitation at its base, with different displacement amplitudes,
was studied by finite element analysis. The efficiency of the TLD in improving the seismic response of an existing building, representative of modern architecture buildings in southern European countries was also evaluated based on linear dynamic analyses
Generation of higher derivatives operators and electromagnetic wave propagation in a Lorentz-violation scenario
We study the perturbative generation of higher-derivative operators as
corrections to the photon effective action, which are originated from a Lorentz
violation background. Such corrections are obtained, at one-loop order, through
the proper-time method, using the zeta function regularization. We focus over
the lowest order corrections and investigate their influence in the propagation
of electromagnetic waves through the vacuum, in the presence of a strong,
constant magnetic field. This is a setting of experimental relevance, since it
bases active efforts to measure non linear electromagnetic effects. After
surprising cancellations of Lorentz violating corrections to the Maxwell's
equation, we show that no effects of the kind of Lorentz violation we consider
can be detected in such a context.Comment: v2: 13 pages, no figures, section IV considerably rewritten, main
results unchanged and are now obtained in a simpler way. To appear in PL
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