Nonlinear finite element analysis for seismic performance of high-strength concrete beam-column joints with new reinforcement details

Because the factors that affect the behavior of the beam-column joints are complicated, an experimental study alone is not sufficient. Therefore, a nonlinear finite element analysis was conducted to provide better understanding of the performance of the beam-column joints. The authors intend to do the parameter study with nonlinear finite element method after a lot of high-strength concrete beam-column joints have been experimented. In this paper, the analytical model firstly was applied to simulate the experimental joint behavior and the comparison results were very well. Based on this, the parametric analysis of concrete strength on seismic performance of beam-column joints has been conducted.published_or_final_versio

New Terms for the Compact Form of Electroweak Chiral Lagrangian

The compact form of the electroweak chiral Lagrangian is a reformulation of its original form and is expressed in terms of chiral rotated electroweak gauge fields, which is crucial for relating the information of underlying theories to the coefficients of the low-energy effective Lagrangian. However the compact form obtained in previous works is not complete. In this letter we add several new chiral invariant terms to it and discuss the contributions of these terms to the original electroweak chiral Lagrangian.Comment: 3 pages, references adde

Quantum measurement characteristics of double-dot single electron transistor

Owing to a few unique advantages, double-dot single electron transistor has been proposed as an alternative detector for charge states. In this work, we present a further study for its signal-to-noise property, based on a full analysis of the setup configuration symmetry. It is found that the effectiveness of the double-dot detector can approach that of an ideal detector, if the symmetric capacitive coupling is taken into account. The quantum measurement efficiency is also analyzed, by comparing the measurement time with the measurement-induced dephasing time.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Behaviour of plate anchorage in plate-reinforced composite coupling beams

As a new alternative design, plate-reinforced composite (PRC) coupling beam achieves enhanced strength and ductility by embedding a vertical steel plate into a conventionally reinforced concrete (RC) coupling beam. Based on a non-linear finite element model developed in the authors’ previous study, a parametric study presented in this paper has been carried out to investigate the influence of several key parameters on the overall performance of PRC coupling beams. The effects of steel plate geometry, span-to-depth ratio of beams and steel reinforcement ratios at beam spans and in wall regions are quantified. It is found that the anchorage length of the steel plate is primarily controlled by the span-to-depth ratio of the beam. Based on the numerical results, a design curve is proposed for determining the anchorage length of the steel plate. The load-carrying capacity of short PRC coupling beams with high steel ratio is found to be controlled by the steel ratio of wall piers. The maximum shear stress of PRC coupling beams should be limited to 15 MPa.published_or_final_versio

Preliminary study of masonry - RC hybrid structure behavior under earthquake loading

Low-rise confined masonry structures are widely used in earthquake-risked rural areas. Most of these structures fail in shear pattern under lateral earthquake loading. In this study, as an improvement for earthquake resistance and post-quake restoration, a masonry – reinforced concrete (RC) hybrid structure, whose working mechanism is different from that of its predecessor, is proposed. The “tie beams” and ‘tie columns”, which function only as confinement in a conventional confined masonry wall structure, now also resist most of the gravity loading, while the wall panels take the rest of it. On the other hand, wall panels in the proposed hybrid structure will absorb most of the energy induced by lateral earthquake loading by the formation of a plastic hinge region in the panel center so that severe damages can be controlled within the wall panel region. To investigate shear behaviors of masonry walls, diagonal compression tests were performed and finite element simulation was utilized to verify the work mechanism of this hybrid structure.postprin

Exploiting temporal information for 3D pose estimation

In this work, we address the problem of 3D human pose estimation from a sequence of 2D human poses. Although the recent success of deep networks has led many state-of-the-art methods for 3D pose estimation to train deep networks end-to-end to predict from images directly, the top-performing approaches have shown the effectiveness of dividing the task of 3D pose estimation into two steps: using a state-of-the-art 2D pose estimator to estimate the 2D pose from images and then mapping them into 3D space. They also showed that a low-dimensional representation like 2D locations of a set of joints can be discriminative enough to estimate 3D pose with high accuracy. However, estimation of 3D pose for individual frames leads to temporally incoherent estimates due to independent error in each frame causing jitter. Therefore, in this work we utilize the temporal information across a sequence of 2D joint locations to estimate a sequence of 3D poses. We designed a sequence-to-sequence network composed of layer-normalized LSTM units with shortcut connections connecting the input to the output on the decoder side and imposed temporal smoothness constraint during training. We found that the knowledge of temporal consistency improves the best reported result on Human3.6M dataset by approximately $12.2\%$ and helps our network to recover temporally consistent 3D poses over a sequence of images even when the 2D pose detector fails

Samlande och visualiserande av verksamhetsstyrande data för en digital marknadsföringsbyrå

I dagens läge, med stor konkurrens mellan företag i samma bransch är det ytterst viktigt för företag att veta hur de når sina målgrupper. I detta examensarbete diskuteras vikten av verksamhetsstyrande data, hur det samlats och visualiserats tidigare jämfört med idag, och hur företag använder sig av den för att göra beslut och ändringar i sina strategier. Arbetet hänvisar till flera artiklar och intervjuer med experter inom visualisering av data, samt datadriven beslutsfattning inom företag. Målet med arbetet är att ha en fungerande nätverksapplikation, skriven i Node.js, som automatiskt sköter samlande av data från olika molntjänster ett företag använder. Utöver samlandet skall applikationen kunna utföra räkningar på data och skicka den vidare till en tjänst som visualiserar den i olika widgets på en dashboard.With increasing competition between companies within the same area, it is becoming more important than ever for companies to know how to reach their target groups. This thesis focus on the importance of performance related data, how it has been gathered and visualized earlier compared to today, and how companies use it to make data-based decisions for their strategies. Articles and interviews with experts in the fields of data visualization and data driven management are reviewed in the thesis. The goal is to have a working network application that gathers data from several online services in use by the company. In addition to gathering, the application will also perform calculations and format the data in such a way that it is easy to visualize using widgets on dashboards

Extension and approximation of mm-subharmonic functions

Let $\Omega\subset \mathbb C^n$ be a bounded domain, and let $f$ be a real-valued function defined on the whole topological boundary $\partial \Omega$. The aim of this paper is to find a characterization of the functions $f$ which can be extended to the inside to a $m$-subharmonic function under suitable assumptions on $\Omega$. We shall do so by using a function algebraic approach with focus on $m$-subharmonic functions defined on compact sets. We end this note with some remarks on approximation of $m$-subharmonic functions

Atomic Layer Deposition of ZnO on Multi-walled Carbon Nanotubes and Its Use for Synthesis of CNT-ZnO Heterostructures.

In this article, direct coating of ZnO on PECVD-grown multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) is achieved using atomic layer deposition (ALD). Transmission electron microscopy investigation shows that the deposited ZnO shell is continuous and uniform, in contrast to the previously reported particle morphology. The ZnO layer has a good crystalline quality as indicated by Raman and photoluminescence (PL) measurements. We also show that such ZnO layer can be used as seed layer for subsequent hydrothermal growth of ZnO nanorods, resulting in branched CNT-inorganic hybrid nanostructures. Potentially, this method can also apply to the fabrication of ZnO-based hybrid nanostructures on other carbon nanomaterials.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Molecular cloning and transcriptional activity of a new Petunia calreticulin gene involved in pistil transmitting tract maturation, progamic phase, and double fertilization

Calreticulin (CRT) is a highly conserved and ubiquitously expressed Ca2+-binding protein in multicellular eukaryotes. As an endoplasmic reticulum-resident protein, CRT plays a key role in many cellular processes including Ca2+ storage and release, protein synthesis, and molecular chaperoning in both animals and plants. CRT has long been suggested to play a role in plant sexual reproduction. To begin to address this possibility, we cloned and characterized the full-length cDNA of a new CRT gene (PhCRT) from Petunia. The deduced amino acid sequence of PhCRT shares homology with other known plant CRTs, and phylogenetic analysis indicates that the PhCRT cDNA clone belongs to the CRT1/CRT2 subclass. Northern blot analysis and fluorescent in situ hybridization were used to assess PhCRT gene expression in different parts of the pistil before pollination, during subsequent stages of the progamic phase, and at fertilization. The highest level of PhCRT mRNA was detected in the stigma–style part of the unpollinated pistil 1 day before anthesis and during the early stage of the progamic phase, when pollen is germinated and tubes outgrow on the stigma. In the ovary, PhCRT mRNA was most abundant after pollination and reached maximum at the late stage of the progamic phase, when pollen tubes grow into the ovules and fertilization occurs. PhCRT mRNA transcripts were seen to accumulate predominantly in transmitting tract cells of maturing and receptive stigma, in germinated pollen/growing tubes, and at the micropylar region of the ovule, where the female gametophyte is located. From these results, we suggest that PhCRT gene expression is up-regulated during secretory activity of the pistil transmitting tract cells, pollen germination and outgrowth of the tubes, and then during gamete fusion and early embryogenesis