Rheological and Ultimate Strength Properties of Cohesive Soils

In recent years, there have been considerable advances made in rheological theory and its application to various materials. There has not been, however, nearly as much work done toward applying rheology to soil mechanics as the successes of others would seem to indicate. For instance, it has been shown that a variety of stress and deflection problems considering the application of a load by means of an elastic plate to an elastic foundation can be extended to include rate effects through the application of linear viscoelastic theory. Before this theory can be applied to foundation design, however, two questions must be answered: 1) do soils generally conform to linear viscoelastic behavior? and 2) how can the design parameters be determined? A better knowledge of the long-term deformation properties of cohesive soils also would be invaluable in the analysis of the stability of slopes. For example, it has been determined from creep tests that, at loads less than those required to cause failure in triaxial shear tests, failure may occur after an extended period of loading

Proposed Remedial Design for Unstable Highway Embankment Foundation: I-64-6(6) 117, Bath County

Early in 1966, during the construction of a large embankment between Stations 1738+00 and 1745+00 on I 64 in Bath County (I 64-6(6)117, SP 6-404-5G1), a serious slide occurred involving large quantities of the embankment material. After a visit to the site and a review of the subsurface information available, it was assessed that the slide occurred as a result of a bearing-capacity failure of the foundation material

Locating and Tracing Seepage Water in Unstable Slopes

With the increase in modern highway construction, the occurrence of landslides has been growing proportionally due to the use of deeper cuts and higher fills. It has been observed that landslides on highways often occur in fills on hillsides. Accumulation of water in the embankment, usually seeping from a nearby hill, may reduce the shear strength of the embankment soil and result in failure at a later time. Many landslides on Kentucky highways have occurred a few years after construction and obviously have been caused by the gradual weakening of the embankment due to a damming and accumulation of water. Thus, locating and tracing seepage water in unstable slopes or in potential landslide areas become a significant tool in designing systems to remove or cut off the water so that the stability of the slope is maintained or increased. Locating and tracing ground water have been done by two old and effective but rather expensive and time-consuming methods - borings and excavation. In recent years, efforts have been made to develop methods which are as effective as borings and excavation but require less time and can be accomplished at lower costs. The study reported herein is part of this effort to improve techniques. Interesting information and additional data have been added to the state of knowledge. In this investigation, several methods, such as the use of tracers, water table observation, and electrical resistivity, were considered and studied

A New Stellar Atmosphere Grid and Comparisons with HST/STIS Calspec Flux Distributions

The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) has measured the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for several stars of types O, B, A, F, and G. These absolute fluxes from the CALSPEC database are fit with a new spectral grid computed from the ATLAS-APOGEE ATLAS9 model atmosphere database using a chi-square minimization technique in four parameters. The quality of the fits are compared for complete LTE grids by Castelli & Kurucz (CK04) and our new comprehensive LTE grid (BOSZ). For the cooler stars, the fits with the MARCS LTE grid are also evaluated, while the hottest stars are also fit with the NLTE Lanz & Hubeny OB star grids. Unfortunately, these NLTE models do not transition smoothly in the infrared to agree with our new BOSZ LTE grid at the NLTE lower limit of Teff =15,000K. The new BOSZ grid is available via the Space Telescope Institute MAST archive and has a much finer sampled IR wavelength scale than CK04, which will facilitate the modeling of stars observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Our result for the angular diameter of Sirius agrees with the ground- based interferometric value.Comment: 11 figure

The Baryon-Dark Matter Ratio Via Moduli Decay After Affleck-Dine Baryogenesis

Low-scale supersymmetry breaking in string motivated theories implies the presence of O(100) TeV scale moduli, which generically lead to a significant modification of the history of the universe prior to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Such an approach implies a non-thermal origin for dark matter resulting from scalar decay, where the lightest supersymmetric particle can account for the observed dark matter relic density. We study the further effect of the decay on the baryon asymmetry of the universe, and find that this can satisfactorily address the problem of the over-production of the baryon asymmetry by the Affleck-Dine mechanism in the MSSM. Remarkably, there is a natural connection between the baryon and dark matter abundances today, which leads to a solution of the `Cosmic Coincidence Problem'.Comment: 12 pages, no figure. v2: references adde

Selected Features of Kentucky Geology from Lexington to Pineville

Kentucky has been disturbed by two major catastrophic events. The major portion of the state was upheaved to what is referred to as the Cincinnati Anticline, and erosion has resulted in forming of several physiographic regions, four of which will be traversed on this trip--namely, the Inner Blue Grass region, the Outer Blue Grass region, the Knobs, and the Eastern Coal Fields. The second major catastrophic event was the Appalachian folding, of which the Pine Mountain Overthrust and its faulting affects the southeastern Kentucky area. The Inner Blue Grass region contains the lowest exposed geologic formation in Kentucky which is the Middle Ordovician exposed in the bluffs of the Kentucky River at Clays Ferry. The limestones of the Middle Ordovician are major sources of the quarry industry, which provides aggregates for the concrete and roadbuilding industries. Rocks of Upper Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian ages, are exposed in the Outer Blue Grass. The transition from the Outer Blue Grass into the Knobs region can be recognized by a strata of black shale having considerable thickness. The Knobs region is a ring of hills, mainly exposing Mississippian age materials. This ring is a relatively narrow band compared to the other three major regions. The Eastern Coal Field is of the Pennsylvanian era and contains numerous coal seams varing widely in thickness. Most of these coal beds have been commercially exploited by tunneling and strip mining methods. Evidence of old strip mining activities can be seen on the upper slopes of the hills starting midway between London and Barbourville. The strip mining activities became more prominent nearer Pineville. Included herein is a continuous road log of exposed geologic formations visible in roadway cuts and outcrops. Distinctive formations are located by the distance in miles from the starting point. An overall, brief, stratigraphic outline is presented to show the general geological relationships and a detailed columnar section of each of the major physiographic regions is shown

Stability Analyses of Earth Masses

During the past few months (January, 1966, to the present) the Division of Research has been called upon to make site investigations and analyses of foundation and slope stability at several locations in the State. These requests have emanated from various offices and divisions of the Department. Some of these investigations involved considerable effort and time to perform the subsurface exploration and to analyze the problem so that recommendations could be made. These investigations were of significant magnitude and are being summarized in this report

On the kinks and dynamical phase transitions of alpha-helix protein chains

Heuristic insights into a physical picture of Davydov's solitonic model of the one-dimensional protein chain are presented supporting the idea of a non-equilibrium competition between the Davydov phase and a complementary, dynamical- `ferroelectric' phase along the chainComment: small latex file with possible glue problems, just go on !, no figures, small corrections with respect to the published text, follow-up work to cond-mat/9304034 [PRE 47 (June 1993) R3818

Formal Component-Based Semantics

One of the proposed solutions for improving the scalability of semantics of programming languages is Component-Based Semantics, introduced by Peter D. Mosses. It is expected that this framework can also be used effectively for modular meta theoretic reasoning. This paper presents a formalization of Component-Based Semantics in the theorem prover Coq. It is based on Modular SOS, a variant of SOS, and makes essential use of dependent types, while profiting from type classes. This formalization constitutes a contribution towards modular meta theoretic formalizations in theorem provers. As a small example, a modular proof of determinism of a mini-language is developed.Comment: In Proceedings SOS 2011, arXiv:1108.279