1,054 research outputs found
Mixed-mode fracture and load misalignment on the assessment of FRP-concrete bond connections
Considerable dispersion is usually found in experimental data concerning the material properties of FRP-concrete bond connections. In pure shear models, the direction of FRP loading is assumed to be parallel to the axis of the concrete specimen. However, in practice, it is very difficult to prevent load misalignment. This fact can have important consequences on the derivation of material properties from experimental data. This is why a parametric study is herein undertaken to thoroughly identify the role of the load misalignment in the behaviour of the connection. It is concluded that the load capacity of the connection significantly decreases in the case of a misaligned load pointing outwards the reinforced surface. It is also found that this effect is less relevant for thick laminates when compared to thin FRP sheets.Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE150101703); Faculty of Engineering & Information Technologie
Astrometry of the main satellites of Uranus: 18 years of observations
We determine accurate positions of the main satellites of Uranus: Miranda,
Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. Positions of Uranus, as derived from those
of these satellites, are also determined. The observational period spans from
1992 to 2011. All runs were made at the Pico dos Dias Observatory, Brazil.
We used the software called Platform for Reduction of Astronomical Images
Automatically (PRAIA) to minimise (digital coronography) the influence of the
scattered light of Uranus on the astrometric measurements and to determine
accurate positions of the main satellites. The positions of Uranus were then
indirectly determined by computing the mean differences between the observed
and ephemeris positions of these satellites. A series of numerical filters was
applied to filter out spurious data. These filters are mostly based on the
comparison between the positions of Oberon with those of the other satellites
and on the offsets as given by the differences between the observed and
ephemeris positions of all satellites.
We have, for the overall offsets of the five satellites, -29 (+/-63) mas in
right ascension and -27 (+/-46) mas in declination. For the overall difference
between the offsets of Oberon and those of the other satellites, we have +3
(+/-30) mas in right ascension and -2 (+/-28) mas in declination. Ephemeris
positions for the satellites were determined from DE432+ura111. Comparisons
using other modern ephemerides for the solar system -INPOP13c- and for the
motion of the satellites -NOE-7-2013- were also made. They confirm that the
largest contribution to the offsets we find comes from the motion of the
barycenter of the Uranus system around the barycenter of the solar system, as
given by the planetary ephemerides. Catalogues with the observed positions are
provided.Comment: 13 pages, 21 figure
Molecular modeling and structural analysis of the Myelin basic protein-Q65ZS4.
Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a chronic, debilitating psychotic mental disorder that affects about 1 percent of the population in different countries. Scz is characterized by a series of negative and positive symptoms including psychomotor retardation, attentional impairment, decreased emotional expression, psychomotor agitation, and auditory hallucinations.X-meeting 2007
Cultivation-independent methods applied to the microbial prospection of oil and gas in soil from a sedimentary basin in Brazil
The upper parts of oil field structures may leak gas which is supposed to be indirectly detected by the soil bacterial populations. Such microorganisms are capable of consuming this gas, supporting the Microbial Prospection of Oil and Gas (MPOG) methodology. The goal of the present work was to characterize microbial communities involved in short-chain alkane metabolism, namely methane, ethane and propane, in samples from a petroliferous (P) soil through clone libraries of the 16S rRNA gene of the Domains Bacteria and Archaea and the catabolic gene coding for the soluble di-iron monooxygenase (SDIMO) enzyme alpha subunit. The microbial community presented high abundance of the bacterial phylum Actinobacteria, which represented 53% of total clones, and the Crenarchaeota group I.1b from the Archaea Domain. The analysis of the catabolic genes revealed the occurrence of seven Operational Protein Families (OPF) and higher richness (Chao = 7; Ace = 7.5) and diversity (Shannon = 1.09) in P soil when compared with a non-petroliferous (Np) soil (Chao = 2; Ace = 0, Shannon = 0.44). Clones related to the ethene monooxygenase (EtnC) and methane monooxygenase (MmoX) coding genes occurred only in P soil, which also presented higher levels of methane and lower levels of ethane and propane, revealed by short-chain hydrocarbon measures. Real-time PCR results suggested that the SDIMO genes occur in very low abundance in the soil samples under study. Further investigations on SDIMOs genes in natural environments are necessary to unravel their still uncharted diversity and to provide reliable tools for the prospection of degrading populations
Incremental bounded model checking for embedded software
Program analysis is on the brink of mainstream usage in embedded systems development. Formal verification of behavioural requirements, finding runtime errors and test case generation are some of the most common applications of automated verification tools based on bounded model checking (BMC). Existing industrial tools for embedded software use an off-the-shelf bounded model checker and apply it iteratively to verify the program with an increasing number of unwindings. This approach unnecessarily wastes time repeating work that has already been done and fails to exploit the power of incremental SAT solving. This article reports on the extension of the software model checker CBMC to support incremental BMC and its successful integration with the industrial embedded software verification tool BTC EMBEDDED TESTER. We present an extensive evaluation over large industrial embedded programs, mainly from the automotive industry. We show that incremental BMC cuts runtimes by one order of magnitude in comparison to the standard non-incremental approach, enabling the application of formal verification to large and complex embedded software. We furthermore report promising results on analysing programs with arbitrary loop structure using incremental BMC, demonstrating its applicability and potential to verify general software beyond the embedded domain
Some interesting features of new massive gravity
A proof that new massive gravity - the massive 3D gravity model proposed by
Bergshoeff, Hohm and Townsend (BHT) - is the only unitary system at the tree
level that can be constructed by augmenting planar gravity through the
curvature-squared terms, is presented. Two interesting gravitational properties
of the BHT model, namely, time dilation and time delay, which have no
counterpart in the usual Einstein 3D gravity, are analyzed as well.Comment: Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit
- âŠ