Control of across-wind vortex shedding induced vibrations in tall buildings using the tuned mass-damper-inerter (TMDI)

In this paper, the effectiveness of the tuned mass-damper-inerter (TMDI) vis-à-vis the classical tuned mass-damper (TMD) is assessed to suppress vortex shedding induced vibrations to tall building structures in the across-wind direction. The TMDI, previously proposed in the literature to mitigate earthquake-induced vibrations in multi-storey buildings, benefits from the mass amplification effect of the inerter (i.e., a two-terminal device developing a resisting force proportional to the relative acceleration of its terminals by the inertance constant) to achieve improved vibration suppression performance from the classical TMD for the same attached mass. Herein, a linear reduced-order structural system is developed, defined by a diagonal mass matrix and full damping and stiffness matrices, which captures faithfully the dynamic properties of a detailed finite element model corresponding to a benchmark 74-storey building with square floor plan. A TMDI is added to the structural system by elementary operations to the mass, damping, and stiffness matrices under the assumption of an ideal linear inerter. The wind action is represented by an analytical spectral density matrix modelling correlated across-wind induced forces accounting for vortex shedding and the structural analysis step is undertaken in the frequency domain for efficiency. A comprehensive parametric analysis is undertaken demonstrating that the TMDI achieves better performance in terms of peak top floor acceleration reduction with increasing inertance than a classical TMD with the same attached mass. This is also true for relatively small attached masses of practical interest to tall buildings (less than 0.5% the total buildings mass) for the case of peak top floor displacements. Further, it is shown that the TMDI reduces significantly the peak attached mass displacement, while the peak developing forces at the inerter are not excessive and can be locally accommodated by the building

Produção de semente genética de arroz irrigado através do sistema de transplante de mudas.

bitstream/item/31543/1/comunicado60.pd

Secagem do arroz.

bitstream/CPACT-2009-09/11058/1/comunicado_145.pd

The Music of Your Emotions: Neural Substrates Involved in Detection of Emotional Correspondence between Auditory and Visual Music Actions

In humans, emotions from music serve important communicative roles. Despite a growing interest in the neural basis of music perception, action and emotion, the majority of previous studies in this area have focused on the auditory aspects of music performances. Here we investigate how the brain processes the emotions elicited by audiovisual music performances. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, and in Experiment 1 we defined the areas responding to audiovisual (musician's movements with music), visual (musician's movements only), and auditory emotional (music only) displays. Subsequently a region of interest analysis was performed to examine if any of the areas detected in Experiment 1 showed greater activation for emotionally mismatching performances (combining the musician's movements with mismatching emotional sound) than for emotionally matching music performances (combining the musician's movements with matching emotional sound) as presented in Experiment 2 to the same participants. The insula and the left thalamus were found to respond consistently to visual, auditory and audiovisual emotional information and to have increased activation for emotionally mismatching displays in comparison with emotionally matching displays. In contrast, the right thalamus was found to respond to audiovisual emotional displays and to have similar activation for emotionally matching and mismatching displays. These results suggest that the insula and left thalamus have an active role in detecting emotional correspondence between auditory and visual information during music performances, whereas the right thalamus has a different role

Hierarchical Divergence Conforming Bases for Tip Singularities in Quadrilateral Cells

Electromagnetic scattering from targets such as thin conducting plates induce singular currents and charges at sharp edges and sharp tips. In this article, a hierarchical family of divergence-conforming singular basis functions are presented for modeling the singularities associated with current and charge density at tips. These new basis functions are used to increment existing edge-singular bases so that on cells that contain a singular tip where two singular edges join together, the final base combines a hierarchical polynomial representation with linearly independent singular terms that incorporate general exponents that may be adjusted for the specific wedge angle of interest and for the specific angle at the tip. Several variations on the tip functions are proposed

Integral Transformations to Handle Corner Function Singularities

Recent approaches to model corner singularities in electromagnetic analysis require a treatment substantially different from that of edge singularities. In this article, new algorithms are proposed for handling the combination of corner singularities and Green’s function singularities on quadrilateral cells in method-of-moments procedures

Arsenic trioxide and ascorbic acid interfere with the BCL2 family genes in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes: an ex-vivo study.

BACKGROUND: Arsenic Trioxide (ATO) is effective in about 20% of patients with myelodysplasia (MDS); its mechanisms of action have already been evaluated in vitro, but the in vivo activity is still not fully understood. Since ATO induces apoptosis in in vitro models, we compared the expression of 93 apoptotic genes in patients’ bone marrow before and after ATO treatment. For this analysis, we selected 12 patients affected by MDS who received ATO in combination with Ascorbic Acid in the context of the Italian clinical trial NCT00803530, EudracT Number 2005-001321-28. METHODS: Real-time PCR quantitative assays for genes involved in apoptosis were performed using TaqMan® Assays in 384-Well Microfluidic Cards “TaqMan® Human Apoptosis Array”. Quantitative RT-PCR for expression of EVI1 and WT1 genes was also performed. Gene expression values (Ct) were normalized to the median expression of 3 housekeeping genes present in the card (18S, ACTB and GAPDH). RESULTS: ATO treatment induced up-regulation of some pro-apoptotic genes, such as HRK, BAK1, CASPASE-5, BAD, TNFRSF1A, and BCL2L14 and down-regulation of ICEBERG. In the majority of cases with stable disease, apoptotic gene expression profile did not change, whereas in cases with advanced MDS more frequently pro-apoptotic genes were up-regulated. Two patients achieved a major response: in the patient with refractory anemia the treatment down-regulated 69% of the pro-apoptotic genes, whereas 91% of the pro-apoptotic genes were up-regulated in the patient affected by refractory anemia with excess of blasts-1. Responsive patients showed a higher induction of BAD than those with stable disease. Finally, WT1 gene expression was down-regulated by the treatment in responsive cases. CONCLUSIONS: These results represent the basis for a possible association of ATO with other biological compounds able to modify the apoptotic pathways, such as inhibitors of the BCL2 family

Optimal tuning and assessment of inertial dampers with grounded inerter for vibration control of seismically excited base-isolated systems

In this paper, the concept of an ideal grounded linear inerter, endowing supplemental inertia to passive linear tuned mass-dampers (TMDs) through its inertance property without increasing the TMD mass, is considered to reduce lateral displacement demands in base isolated structural systems (BISs). Optimal tuned mass-damper-inerter (TMDI) design parameters are numerically determined to maximize energy dissipation by the TMDI under stationary white noise support excitation. Performance of these optimally designed TMDI-equipped BISs is assessed for stationary white and colored noise excitations as well as for four recorded earthquake acceleration ground motions (GMs) with different non-stationary frequency content. It is found that for fixed mass ratio the inclusion of the grounded inerter reduces significantly secondary mass displacement and stroke for all considered excitations while it improves appreciably BIS displacement demands except for the particular case of a near-fault accelerogram characterized by early arrival of a high-energy low-frequency pulse as captured in its wavelet spectrogram. More importantly, it leads further to reductions to BIS acceleration demands with the exception of colored noise excitation for which an insignificant increase is noted. The positive effects of the inerter saturate with increasing inertance and BIS damping ratio demonstrating that small inertance values are more effective in vibration suppression of BISs with low inherent damping. Overall, it is recommended to combine low damping isolation layers with large inertance and low secondary mass TMDIs

Self help groups in a city of Tuscany: Reconstruction of the second generation model of work for professionals and services

This study is part of a more extensive project aimed to investigate the effectiveness of self-help group participation in improving quality of life in mental disease. The study is taking place in the Tuscany Region, in Italy. In the first qualitative step of analysis researchers are interested in describing the specific features of the psychiatric self-help movement in Tuscany, comparing different realities, networks, kind of groups. Therefore, our aim is to collect exhaustive information to describe how self-help system work in different provinces at the present moment. The implementation of groups for psychiatric problems is quite young in Italy.  Because of a lack of specific regulation in the directives of the Italian health care system, every local service has implemented groups differently, sometimes enhancing, sometimes dismissing them. Prato, near Florence, is one of the more interesting context for the birth of psychiatric self-help movement in the region: public health services improved groups since early 90’s, it was one of the first self-help reality linked to services in the entire region. Now we are in a “second generation” of professionals, and the original meaning of groups seems to be transformed, sometimes misunderstood. Our objectives of study head us toward an in depth analysis of self-help phenomenon in Prato