Rehabilitation Works Of The Existing Asphalt Pavement And Connecting The Existing Asphalt Pavement With The Newly Constructed Pavement, Motorway E-75, Section Tabanovce - Kumanovo From Km 0+764.70 To Km 8+388.43, Part Of The Corridor X

The Corridor X is part of the pan-European network of corridors. The starting point of the corridor is in Salzburg, Austria and the end point is in Thessaloniki, Greece. The corridor passes through Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Greece. The Construction of the Corridor is supported by the international financing institutions like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The paper refers to one of the sections in R. Macedonia that is under the construction, section between Tabanovce and Kumanovo in length of 7.62 km.Part of the pavement works consisted of rehabilitation of the existing pavement with applying polymer grids, specially designed for such purpose. In the paper the entire procedure of the pavement design will be presented, with particular attention on the quality requirements of the materials that should be for the road construction. Numerical analysis of the pavement was accomplished using the software package PLAXIS. The results of these analyses are presented in the paper, namely: stress fields and zones where the plasticity limit of the materials was reached. The cross section was treated with and without polymer grids. The number of the polymer grids in the cross section was also varied, as well as its location. The presented procedure of the pavement design coul

Soft Robotics for Chemists

Soft robots: A methodology based on embedded pneumatic networks (PneuNets) is described that enables large-amplitude actuations in soft elastomers by pressurizing embedded channels. Examples include a structure that can change its curvature from convex to concave, and devices that act as compliant grippers for handling fragile objects (e.g., a chicken egg).Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

Fragmentation of exotic oxygen isotopes

Abrasion-ablation models and the empirical EPAX parametrization of projectile fragmentation are described. Their cross section predictions are compared to recent data of the fragmentation of secondary beams of neutron-rich, unstable 19,20,21O isotopes at beam energies near 600 MeV/nucleon as well as data for stable 17,18O beams

Folate, Homocysteine, and Arsenic Metabolism in Arsenic-Exposed Individuals in Bangladesh

Chronic exposure to arsenic is occurring throughout South and East Asia due to groundwater contamination of well water. Variability in susceptibility to arsenic toxicity may be related to nutritional status. Arsenic is methylated to monomethylarsonic acid (MMA) and dimethylarsinic acid (DMA) via one-carbon metabolism, a biochemical pathway that is dependent on folate. The majority of one-carbon metabolism methylation reactions are devoted to biosynthesis of creatine, the precursor of creatinine. Our objectives of this cross-sectional study were to characterize the relationships among folate, cobalamin, homocysteine, and arsenic metabolism in Bangladeshi adults. Water arsenic, urinary arsenic, urinary creatinine, plasma folate, cobalamin, and homocysteine were assessed in 1,650 adults; urinary arsenic metabolites were analyzed for a subset of 300 individuals. The percentage of DMA in urine was positively associated with plasma folate (r = 0.14, p = 0.02) and negatively associated with total homocysteine (tHcys; r = −0.14, p = 0.01). Conversely, percent MMA was negatively associated with folate (r = −0.12, p = 0.04) and positively associated with tHcys (r = 0.21, p = 0.0002); percent inorganic arsenic (InAs) was negatively associated with folate (r = −0.12, p = 0.03). Urinary creatinine was positively correlated with percent DMA (r = 0.40 for males, p < 0.0001; 0.25 for females, p = 0.001), and with percent InAs (r = −0.45 for males, p < 0.0001; −0.20 for females, p = 0.01). Collectively, these data suggest that folate, tHcys, and other factors involved in one-carbon metabolism influence arsenic methylation. This may be particularly relevant in Bangladesh, where the prevalence of hyperhomocysteinemia is extremely high

From thermal rectifiers to thermoelectric devices

We discuss thermal rectification and thermoelectric energy conversion from the perspective of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and dynamical systems theory. After preliminary considerations on the dynamical foundations of the phenomenological Fourier law in classical and quantum mechanics, we illustrate ways to control the phononic heat flow and design thermal diodes. Finally, we consider the coupled transport of heat and charge and discuss several general mechanisms for optimizing the figure of merit of thermoelectric efficiency.Comment: 42 pages, 22 figures, review paper, to appear in the Springer Lecture Notes in Physics volume "Thermal transport in low dimensions: from statistical physics to nanoscale heat transfer" (S. Lepri ed.

Low-temperature transport in out-of-equilibrium XXZ chains

We study the low-temperature transport properties of out-of-equilibrium XXZ spin-1/2 chains. We consider the protocol where two semi-infinite chains are prepared in two thermal states at small but different temperatures and suddenly joined together. We focus on the qualitative and quantitative features of the profiles of local observables, which at large times t and distances x from the junction become functions of the ratio \u3b6=x/t. By means of the generalized hydrodynamic equations, we analyse the rich phenomenology arising by considering different regimes of the phase diagram. In the gapped phases, variations of the profiles are found to be exponentially small in the temperatures but described by non-trivial functions of \u3b6. We provide analytical formulae for the latter, which give accurate results also for small but finite temperatures. In the gapless regime, we show how the three-step conformal predictions for the profiles of energy density and energy current are naturally recovered from the hydrodynamic equations. Moreover, we also recover the recent non-linear Luttinger liquid predictions for low-temperature transport: universal peaks of width \u394\u3b6 1dT emerge at the edges of the light cone in the profiles of generic observables. Such peaks are described by the same function of \u3b6 for all local observables

Ballistic transport and boundary resistances in inhomogeneous quantum spin chains

Transport phenomena are central to physics, and transport in the many-body and fully-quantum regime is attracting an increasing amount of attention. It has been recently revealed that some quantum spin chains support ballistic transport of excitations at all energies. However, when joining two semi-infinite ballistic parts, such as the XX and XXZ spin-1/2 models, our understanding suddenly becomes less established. Employing a matrix-product-state ansatz of the wavefunction, we study the relaxation dynamics in this latter case. Here we show that it takes place inside a light cone, within which two qualitatively different regions coexist: an inner one with a strong tendency towards thermalization, and an outer one supporting ballistic transport. We comment on the possibility that even at infinite time the system supports stationary currents and displays a non-zero Kapitza boundary resistance. Our study paves the way to the analysis of the interplay between transport, integrability, and local defects

Quasi-local conserved charges and spin transport in spin-1 integrable chains

We consider the integrable one-dimensional spin-1 chain defined by the Zamolodchikov-Fateev (ZF) Hamiltonian. The latter is parametrized, analogously to the XXZ spin-1/2 model, by a continuous anisotropy parameter and at the isotropic point coincides with the well-known spin-1 Babujian-Takhtajan Hamiltonian. Following a procedure recently developed for the XXZ model, we explicitly construct a continuous family of quasi-local conserved operators for the periodic spin-1 ZF chain. Our construction is valid for a dense set of commensurate values of the anisotropy parameter in the gapless regime where the isotropic point is excluded. Using the Mazur inequality, we show that, as for the XXZ model, these quasi-local charges are enough to prove that the high-temperature spin Drude weight is non-vanishing in the thermodynamic limit, thus establishing ballistic spin transport at high temperature

R\ue9nyi entropies of generic thermodynamic macrostates in integrable systems

We study the behaviour of R\ue9nyi entropies in a generic thermodynamic macrostate of an integrable model. In the standard quench action approach to quench dynamics, the R\ue9nyi entropies may be derived from the overlaps of the initial state with Bethe eigenstates. These overlaps fix the driving term in the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz (TBA) formalism. We show that this driving term can be also reconstructed starting from the macrostate's particle densities. We then compute explicitly the stationary R\ue9nyi entropies after the quench from the dimer and the tilted N\ue9el state in XXZ spin chains. For the former state we employ the overlap TBA approach, while for the latter we reconstruct the driving terms from the macrostate. We discuss in full detail the limits that can be analytically handled and we use numerical simulations to check our results against the large time limit of the entanglement entropies