BATTER PILES UNDER INCLINED COMPRESSIVE LOADS

The behaviour of batter piles under inclined compressive loads is of considerable importance,yet, not enough information is available in literature on the subject. The tests canied out in this paper were performed on a single inclined pile under various load inclinations in sand. The results indicate that the highest ultimate compressive load for vertical pile occurs at (30) load inclination. At small load inclinations, a positive batter pile has greater ultimate compressive load than that of a negative batter pile. The trend changes at higher Ioad inclinations. The slip surface analysis is recognised to be too complicated to have a definite solution

The digital music lab: A big data infrastructure for digital musicology

In musicology and music research generally, the increasing availability of digital music, storage capacities, and computing power enable and require new and intelligent systems. In the transition from traditional to digital musicology, many techniques and tools have been developed for the analysis of individual pieces of music, but large-scale music data that are increasingly becoming available require research methods and systems that work on the collection-level and at scale. Although many relevant algorithms have been developed during the past 15 years of research in Music Information Retrieval, an integrated system that supports large-scale digital musicology research has so far been lacking. In the Digital Music Lab (DML) project, a collaboration among music librarians, musicologists, computer scientists, and human-computer interface specialists, the DML software system has been developed that fills this gap by providing intelligent large-scale music analysis with a user-friendly interactive interface supporting musicologists in their exploration and enquiry. The DML system empowers musicologists by addressing several challenges: distributed processing of audio and other music data, management of the data analysis process and results, remote analysis of data under copyright, logical inference on the extracted information and metadata, and visual web-based interfaces for exploring and querying the music collections. The DML system is scalable and based on SemanticWeb technology and integrates into Linked Data with the vision of a distributed system that enables music research across archives, libraries, and other providers of music data. A first DML system prototype has been set up in collaboration with the British Library and I Like Music Ltd. This system has been used to analyse a diverse corpus of currently 250,000 music tracks. In this article, we describe the DML system requirements, design, architecture, components, and available data sources, explaining their interaction. We report use cases and applications with initial evaluations of the proposed system

The nanostructure of barium dititanate prepared by hydrothermal method

The dielectric ceramic of barium dititanate compound BaTi2O5 had been prepared through the hydrothermal process by applying different parameters, such as pH-value, reaction time, temperature and pressure. The prepared powders were examined by X-ray diffraction (XRD). The predominant phase was a monoclinic phase with lattice constants (a=16.6381, b=3.555, c=9.3406 Å), (β=107.47∘, α=γ=90∘), and the unit cell volume (527 Å3). The surface morphology was demonstrated by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). It exhibited the grains in spherical and elliptical shapes with high homogeneity. The shapes of nanostructure were analyzed by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). The appearance of nanostructures like the nanoparticles and nano rods were found. The size of nanoparticles was in the range of 9–31nm, and size of nanorods was 32–37nm. The dielectric measurements were done by using LCR meter at different temperature and frequencies (10, 50 and 100kHz). It was clear that the Curie temperature had a high value up to (485∘C). The relative permittivity was partially changed for two prepared samples regarding high pressure and long reaction time, which were the main preparation conditions of hydrothermal method

Dielectric properties of BNT-xBT prepared by hydrothermal process

The BNT ceramic sample might be a good replacement for PZT piezoelectric in industrial applications, especially in energy harvesting from crystal vibrations. In order to enhance the performance of BNT ceramic, the solid solution was chosen by substitution with Ba+2 at Morphtropic Phase Boundary (MPB). The BNT-xBT powders with x=1, 0.07, 0.06 and 0 were prepared by the hydrothermal method with average particle size (65–150nm) at (90∘C/72h). The ceramic disc was sintered at (1150∘C/4h) and showed excellent relative density of about 96%. The results of X-ray diffraction (XRD) confirmed the MPB for x=0.06 and 0.07, while the BNT had a rhombohedral structure and BT had a tetragonal structure. The dielectric measurements showed that BNT, BNT-7BT, BNT-6BT behave as the relaxator ferroelectric and showed a strong dependence on frequency, especially in the MPB region while BT behaves as a normal ferroelectric. Both the Curie temperature and depolarization temperature decrease at the MPB region and showed strong dependency on frequency

Two challenging cases of anti-MDA-5 dermatomyositis with rapidly progressive interstitial lung disease

Anti-MDA-5 dermatomyositis (DM) is a subtype of idiopathic inflammatory myopathy, commonly presenting as clinically amyopathic dermatomyositis. It is associated with rapidly progressive interstitial lung disease and a poor prognosis. Here, we present two cases of anti-MDA-5 DM and discuss the challenges associated with timely diagnosis, and the importance of early and aggressive treatment