Influence of mechanical uncertainties on dynamic responses of a full-scale all-FRP footbridge

This is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordThe data analysed in this paper can be reproduced using information provided in the paper.This paper aims to determine the effects of uncertainties in the mechanical properties of FRP composites on the dynamic responses of a full-scale all-FRP bridge. The novelty of the study is in determining the effects that the uncertainties have on the global structural scale properties rather than component properties often studied in literature. To achieve this aim, both uncertainty quantification and global sensitivity analysis are performed using a computationally cost-effective approach based on the polynomial chaos expansion. The results reveal that a coefficient of variation (COV) of 10% for four mechanical parameters can lead to COVs of 3.37%, 2.92% and 3.07% for natural frequencies, COVs of 2.98%, 0.04% and 0.61% for modal masses (corresponding to unity-scaled mode shapes) of the first lateral, first vertical and second vertical modes, and COV of 0.93% for the absolute peak acceleration. The effect of uncertainties, therefore, is very small for the considered excitation case and it could be neglected in the design. In addition, it was found that the longitudinal elastic modulus and shear modulus of the panel are the most influential mechanical parameters in dynamic analysis.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Sonoporation-induced endoplasmic reticulum stress: signaling pathway analysis

Session IUS1-K3: Metrology and sonoporation: abstract no. IUS1-K3-6The Conference program & abstracts' website is located at http://www.ewh.ieee.org/conf/uffc/2013/BACKGROUND, MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVE: Sonoporation can induce a complex range of biological consequences beyond a transient porosity change at the membrane level. In particular, at a subcellular level, the functioning of various organelles may become disrupted. This work represents the first demonstration that the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) (an organelle responsible for protein folding, lipid synthesis, and calcium regulation) may be actively involved in mediating post-sonoporation cellular response. STATEMENT OF CONTRIBUTION/METHODS: We have assayed for various ER-related proteins using Western blot analysis. HL-60 cell suspensions were used …postprin

Simultaneous Metal-Insulator and Antiferromagnetic Transitions in Orthorhombic Perovskite Iridate Sr0.94Ir0.78O2.68 Single Crystals

The orthorhombic perovskite SrIrO3 is a semimetal, an intriguing exception in iridates where the strong spin-orbit interaction coupled with electron correlations tends to impose a novel insulating state. We report results of our investigation of bulk single-crystal Sr0.94Ir0.78O2.68 or Ir-deficient, orthorhombic perovskite SrIrO3. It retains the same crystal structure as stoichiometric SrIrO3 but exhibits a sharp, simultaneous antiferromagnetic (AFM) and metal-insulator (MI) transition at 185 K. Above it, the basal-plane resistivity features an extended regime of almost linear-temperature dependence up to 800 K but the strong electronic anisotropy renders an insulating behavior in the out-of-plane resistivity. The Hall resistivity undergoes an abrupt sign change and grows below 40 K, which along with the Sommerfeld constant of 20 mJ/mole K2 suggests a multiband effect. All results including our first-principles calculations underscore a delicacy of the metallic state in SrIrO3 that is in close proximity to an AFM insulating state. The contrasting ground states in isostructural Sr0.94Ir0.78O2.68 and SrIrO3 illustrate a critical role of even slight lattice distortions in rebalancing the ground state in the iridates. Finally, the observed simultaneous AFM and MI transitions reveal a direct correlation between the magnetic transition and formation of a charge gap in the iridate, which is conspicuously absent in Sr2IrO4.Comment: 5 figure

A perceptual quality metric for 3D triangle meshes based on spatial pooling

© 2018, Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. In computer graphics, various processing operations are applied to 3D triangle meshes and these processes often involve distortions, which affect the visual quality of surface geometry. In this context, perceptual quality assessment of 3D triangle meshes has become a crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a new objective quality metric for assessing the visual difference between a reference mesh and a corresponding distorted mesh. Our analysis indicates that the overall quality of a distorted mesh is sensitive to the distortion distribution. The proposed metric is based on a spatial pooling strategy and statistical descriptors of the distortion distribution. We generate a perceptual distortion map for vertices in the reference mesh while taking into account the visual masking effect of the human visual system. The proposed metric extracts statistical descriptors from the distortion map as the feature vector to represent the overall mesh quality. With the feature vector as input, we adopt a support vector regression model to predict the mesh quality score.We validate the performance of our method with three publicly available databases, and the comparison with state-of-the-art metrics demonstrates the superiority of our method. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves a high correlation between objective assessment and subjective scores