Properties of Concrete Using Treated Low-Class Recycled Coarse Aggregate and Blast Furnace Slag Sand

Since high quality natural aggregates are becoming scarce, it is important that industrial recycled products and by-products are used as aggregates for concrete. In Japan, the use of recycled aggregate (RG) is encouraged. Since, strength and durability of recycled aggregate concrete is lower than that of normal aggregate concrete, the use of recycled aggregate has not been significant. In order to improve physical properties of concrete using recycled coarse aggregate, blast furnace slag sand has been proposed. Recently, blast furnace slag sand is expected to improve durability, freezing, and thawing damage of concrete in Japan. Properties of fresh and hardened concrete bleeding, compressive strength, and resistance to freezing and thawing which are caused by the rapid freezing and thawing test using liquid nitrogen is a high loader than the JIS A 1148 A method that were investigated. As a result, concrete using treated low-class recycled coarse aggregate and 50% or 30% replacement of crushed sand with blast furnace slag sand showed the best results, in terms of bleeding, resistance to freezing and thawing

Optimal Hedging of Basket Barrier Options with Additive Models and Its Application to Equity Value Separation Problem

At the heart of optimal hedging with additive models in Yamada (Recent advances in financial engineering: proceedings of the KIER-TMU international workshop on financial engineering, World Scientific, pp 225–245, 2010; Proceedings of the 2011 American control conference, pp 3856–3861, 2011; Asia-Pac Financ Mark 19(2):149–179, 2012) is to replicate the payoff of European basket options using separate options as close as possible. In this paper, we extend their technique for the case of path-dependent barrier options, where the mean square error of the payoffs between the basket barrier option and the sum of options on the individual assets is minimized over any smooth payoff functions. To this end, we propose to represent the underlying assets using the Brownian bride decomposition and show that computations involving conditional expectations of basket barrier options boil down to those of unconditional expectations. This procedure enables us to provide an algorithm to compute the necessary and sufficient condition for the optimal hedging problem based on the Monte Carlo method. Then, we consider to apply our methodology to the Black–Cox type first passage time structural model, where a defaultable company possesses/runs multiple assets/projects and the default may occur the first time the asset value hits a certain lower threshold before the maturity. We formulate the equity value separation problem using additive models, in which individual equity values are introduced so that their sum approximates the total equity value as close as possible. It is also shown that any portion of total equity value may be assigned as an initial value of each individual equity when using the optimal smooth functions. Finally, we examine the contributions of individual equity values to default or survival by applying a certain normalization for conditional expectations via numerical experiments to illustrate our proposed methodology