Standardized Testing Tolerances for Auger Pressure Grouted Piles Additive Panacea

Panacea is an admixture for auger pressure grouted piles in deep foundation construction which was created by Berkel and Company Contractors, a design build corporation. The admixture is designed to increase workability time and increase water retention to avoid seepage into surrounding soils and allow for the insertion of reinforcing steel after the grout has been placed. The objective of this research was to correlate initial set times with internal temperatures over time for scheduling purposes. Multiple batches with varying amounts of the additive were observed. The research also served to create a standardized set of tolerances for various variables being tested on site for quality control including: temperature, flow, water retention, and viscosity. By implementing these standards and tolerances contractors will be able to better gauge material attributes and in doing so improve the scheduling of critical activities related to deep foundations

Faith : what it is and what it leads to

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdigitalresources/1129/thumbnail.jp

The basement of North Dakota

The purpose of this report is to study the basement rocks of North Dakota. The basement rocks of North Dakota may be divided into two categories. The eastern division comprises deeply weathered material and extends from the Red River westward for approximately thirty miles. The western division essentially comprising adamellite (more than 1/3 but less than 2/3 alkali feldspar and more than 10 percent quartz), extends from a north-south line thirty miles west of the Red River to the Montana border

Book Review: Andrew McStay, Digital Advertising

First paragraph: This is a book in a hurry; perhaps necessarily so. The range of activity the author is seeking to make sense of is developing apace. Exotic to some readers (Second Life for instance) the titular Digital Advertising refers to burgeoning arrays of new communications phenomena which together constitute much of the familiar and ubiquitous architecture of everyday living and working: Google, Facebook and so on. The digital sublime confronts the supermarket shopper. McStay sets the stage well

Storm signals : being a collection of sermons preached on Sunday and Thursday evenings at the Metropolitan Tabernacle

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdigitalresources/1130/thumbnail.jp

Continuous second order sliding mode based finite time tracking of a fully actuated biped robot

International audienceA second order sliding mode controller is modified to form a continuous homogeneous controller. Uniform finite time stability is proved by extending the homogeneity principle of discontinuous systems to the continuous case with uniformly decaying piece-wise continuous nonhomogeneous disturbances. The modified controller is then utilised to track reference trajectories for all the joints of a fully actuated biped robot where the joint torque is modeled as the control input. The modified controller ensures the attainment of a finite settling time between two successive impacts. The main contribution of the paper is to provide straightforward and realizable engineering guidelines for reference trajectory generation and for tuning a robust finite time controller in order to achieve stable gait of a biped in the presence of an external force disturbance. Such a disturbance has destabilising effects in both continuous and impact phases. Numerical simulations of a biped robot are shown to support the theoretical results

Si microwire-array solar cells

Si microwire-array solar cells with Air Mass 1.5 Global conversion efficiencies of up to 7.9% have been fabricated using an active volume of Si equivalent to a 4 μm thick Si wafer. These solar cells exhibited open-circuit voltages of 500 mV, short-circuit current densities (J_(sc)) of up to 24 mA cm^(-2), and fill factors >65% and employed Al_2O_3 dielectric particles that scattered light incident in the space between the wires, a Ag back reflector that prevented the escape of incident illumination from the back surface of the solar cell, and an a-SiN_x:H passivation/anti-reflection layer. Wire-array solar cells without some or all of these design features were also fabricated to demonstrate the importance of the light-trapping elements in achieving a high J_(sc). Scanning photocurrent microscopy images of the microwire-array solar cells revealed that the higher J_(sc) of the most advanced cell design resulted from an increased absorption of light incident in the space between the wires. Spectral response measurements further revealed that solar cells with light-trapping elements exhibited improved red and infrared response, as compared to solar cells without light-trapping elements

Continuous Uniform Finite Time Stabilization of Planar Controllable Systems

Continuous homogeneous controllers are utilized in a full state feedback setting for the uniform finite time stabilization of a perturbed double integrator in the presence of uniformly decaying piecewise continuous disturbances. Semiglobal strong $\mathcal{C}^1$ Lyapunov functions are identified to establish uniform asymptotic stability of the closed-loop planar system. Uniform finite time stability is then proved by extending the homogeneity principle of discontinuous systems to the continuous case with uniformly decaying piecewise continuous nonhomogeneous disturbances. A finite upper bound on the settling time is also computed. The results extend the existing literature on homogeneity and finite time stability by both presenting uniform finite time stabilization and dealing with a broader class of nonhomogeneous disturbances for planar controllable systems while also proposing a new class of homogeneous continuous controllers

Synthesis and Characterization of Silicon Nanorod Arrays for Solar Cell Applications

Silicon nanorods have been grown by chemical vapor deposition of silane, using both gold and indium as catalysts for the vapor liquid solid (VLS) process. Conditions for optimal rod morphology for each catalyst were identified by varying silane partial pressure and temperature in the range P = 0.05-1 Torr and T = 300-600 C, respectively. In most cases, catalyst particles were formed by partial de-wetting of evaporated films of the catalytic material to form droplets with diameters of tens to hundreds of nanometers. Also, periodic arrays of catalyst particles with controlled size and spacing were achieved both by the use of porous alumina membranes and also by electron-beam lithography. Using these techniques, silicon nanorods were grown with diameters of 100 nm to microns and lengths of microns to tens of microns. Four-point and gate-bias-dependent resistance measurements were made on single wires, and these indicate that rods we have grown with gold catalysts and phosphine doping have metal-like conductivity