Experimental and numerical analysis of the cyclic behaviour of RC beam-column connections with plain reinforcing bars

The information available in the literature about the cyclic behaviour of reinforced concrete elements with plain reinforcing bars is scarce. As a consequence, the influence of bar slippage in elements with plain bars is not yet comprehensively understood. In this paper are presented and discussed the main results of the cyclic tests carried out on five full-scale reinforced concrete beam-column joints with plain bars and without specific detailing for seismic demands. An additional joint specimen with deformed bars was also tested for comparison. Furthermore, numerical models were built to simulate the response of two of the specimens. Particular attention was given to the influence of bar slippage. The results of the conducted analyses underline the importance of accounting for bond-slip in the numerical modelling of elements with plain bars and also highlight the need for specific models to simulate the effects of this mechanism in the presence of plain bars

Modeling the input history of programs for improved instruction-memory performance

When a program is loaded into memory for execution, the relative position of its basic blocks is crucial, since loading basic blocks that are unlikely to be executed first places them high in the instruction-memory hierarchy only to be dislodged as the execution goes on. In this paper we study the use of Bayesian networks as models of the input history of a program. The main point is the creation of a probabilistic model that persists as the program is run on different inputs and at each new input refines its own parameters in order to reflect the program's input history more accurately. As the model is thus tuned, it causes basic blocks to be reordered so that, upon arrival of the next input for execution, loading the basic blocks into memory automatically takes into account the input history of the program. We report on extensive experiments, whose results demonstrate the efficacy of the overall approach in progressively lowering the execution times of a program on identical inputs placed randomly in a sequence of varied inputs. We provide results on selected SPEC CINT2000 programs and also evaluate our approach as compared to the gcc level-3 optimization and to Pettis-Hansen reordering

Spectroscopy of Stardust from 200nm to 16µM (with a gap in the middle)

UV/Vis and IR spectroscopy are complementary, non-destructive techniques that can be used to identify the presence of a range of organic and inorganic, hydrated and anhydrous minerals within micron-sized grains. We look forward to applying these techniques to the Stardust materials

Superlens made of a metamaterial with extreme effective parameters

We propose a superlens formed by an ultra-dense array of crossed metallic wires. It is demonstrated that due to the anomalous interaction between crossed wires, the structured substrate is characterized by an anomalously high index of refraction and supports strongly confined guided modes with very short propagation wavelengths. It is theoretically proven that a planar slab of such structured material makes a superlens that may compensate for the attenuation introduced by free-space propagation and restore the subwavelength details of the source. The bandwidth of the proposed device can be quite significant since the response of the structured substrate is non-resonant. The theoretical results are fully supported by numerical simulations.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B (in press

FM 047-02: a collisional pair of galaxies with a ring

Aims. We investigate the nature of the galaxy pair FM 047-02, which has been proposed as an archetype of the Solitaire types of peculiar (collisional) ring galaxies. Methods. The study is based on long-slit spectrophotometric data in the range of 3500-9500 angstrons obtained with the Gemini Multi-ObjectComment: 07 pages, 06 figures, 02 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1206.071