Search results for "0201 civil engineering"
showing 10 items of 242 documents
ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT VISUAL STRATEGIES OF 'ISOLATED VEHICLE' AND 'DISTURBED VEHICLE'
2017
This paper analyses the driver’ visual behaviour in the different conditions of ‘isolated vehicle’ and ‘disturbed vehicle’. If the meaning of the former is clear, the latter condition considers the influence on the driving behaviour of various objects that could be encountered along the road. These can be classified in static (signage, stationary vehicles at the roadside, etc.) and dynamic objects (cars, motorcycles, bicycles). The aim of this paper is to propose a proper analysis regarding the driver’s visual behaviour. In particular, the authors examined the quality of the visually informa-tion acquired from the entire road environment, useful for detecting any critical safety condition. …
Backcalculation of airport pavement moduli and thickness using the Lévy Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm
2016
Interpretation of NDTdata is crucial in any Airport Pavement Management System (APMS), in order to implement strategies to maintain airport pavementssince they allow to estimate their remaining life and related maintenance needs and activities. In this paper, the AntColony Optimization algorithmwasused for backcalculation of pavement moduli from surface deflection data. The algorithm’s performances are illustrated and improvement in prediction quality is demonstrated both in terms of goodness of fitness and computational effort. Moreover, it is proved that the proposed algorithm is also able to predict layer thicknesses, taking into account their variation too.
Microsimulation-based passenger car equivalents for heavy vehicles driving turbo-roundabouts
2016
Due to its geometric design, turbo-roundabouts impose greatest constraints to the vehicular trajectories; by consequence, one can expect a more unfavourable impact of heavy vehicles on the traffic conditions than on other types of roundabouts. The present paper addresses the question of how to estimate Passenger Car Equivalents (PCEs) for heavy vehicles driving turbo-roundabouts. The microsimulation approach used revealed as a useful tool for evaluating the variation of quality of traffic in presence of mixed fleets (different percentages of heavy vehicles). Based on the output of multiple runs of several scenarios simulation, capacity functions for each entry lane of the turbo-roundabout w…
Yacht performance monitoring in real sailing conditions
2019
Abstract In this paper a multi-method approach is used to setup and validate a monitoring system applied to a small sailing boat during real sailing conditions. This monitoring system is able to transform the data coming from some typical devices installed on board into information about the deformed state of the boat. GPS, Wind Data Logger and cameras have been installed on the boat to measure its route and speed, the apparent wind velocity and direction and the positions of the crew members. These data are processed to determine the equilibrium of the boat and estimate the loads applied on it. Then, a CAD/FEM model calculates the effects of these loads on the boat shape. The resulting def…
Transient response of a TLP-type floating offshore wind turbine under tendon failure conditions
2021
Abstract Among various types of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs), the tension leg platform (TLP) floating wind turbines have relatively small motions due to stiff tendons. Similar to TLP applications in the offshore industry, tendon failure may lead to deteriorated stability and large transient responses, which should be considered as part of accidental limit state (ALS) checks at the design stage of the TLP FOWTs. This paper takes the WindStar TLP system as a representative and investigates the transient effects of one-tendon failure on the system responses. A coupled numerical model is first established using the aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation tool FAST. Subsequent numerical s…
Effect of FRP strengthening on the flexural behaviour of calcarenite masonry walls
2017
The use of fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) for structural strengthening has become increasingly popular in recent years. Several applications of FRP have been proposed and applied, depending on the target of the technique, kind and/or material of the structural member. In particular, because of their great tensile strength, FRP materials are commonly used to enhance the out-of-plane behaviour of masonry walls, allowing to increase their strength, ductility and improving safety against overturning. For these reasons, FRP laminates are often applied in vulnerable ancient buildings in seismic areas to reinforce façades and walls with poor structural features. However, some issues arise when a…
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Fire Detection in Images
2017
Detecting fire in images using image processing and computer vision techniques has gained a lot of attention from researchers during the past few years. Indeed, with sufficient accuracy, such systems may outperform traditional fire detection equipment. One of the most promising techniques used in this area is Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, the previous research on fire detection with CNNs has only been evaluated on balanced datasets, which may give misleading information on real-world performance, where fire is a rare event. Actually, as demonstrated in this paper, it turns out that a traditional CNN performs relatively poorly when evaluated on the more realistically balance…
Fluid–structure interaction of downwind sails: a new computational method
2018
The spreading of high computational resources at very low costs led, over the years, to develop new numerical approaches to simulate the fluid surrounding a sail and to investigate the fluidâstructure interaction. Most methods have concentrated on upwind sails, due to the difficulty of implementing downwind sailing configurations that present, usually, the problem of massive flow separation and large displacements of the sail under wind load. For these reasons, the problem of simulating the fluidâstructure interaction (FSI) on downwind sails is still subject of intensive investigation. In this paper, a new weak coupled procedure between a RANS solver and a FEM one has been implemented t…
Performance-Based Engineering of Wind-Excited Structures: A General Methodology
2016
The current prescriptive design philosophy that relies simply on meeting requirements stipulated in standards is shifting towards a performance-based design (PBD) approach for achieving designs that rationally meet society’s need for a truly safe built environment. Extensive research has facilitated the successful adoption of PBD in earthquake engineering, but the same cannot be said for wind engineering. Therefore, the need exists to initiate a similar effort by defining a framework that fully embraces the concepts of PBD during the design of building systems to resist severe wind events. This paper illustrates the development of such a PBD framework. In particular, a method is proposed sp…
Design of RC joints equipped with hybrid trussed beams and friction dampers
2021
Abstract The challenge of this research consists in the first attempt to apply a dissipative friction connection to beam-to-column joints with semi-prefabricated Hybrid Steel-Trussed Concrete Beams (HSTCB) and RC pillars cast in-situ. Nowadays, HSTCBs are widely adopted in civil and industrial buildings and, therefore, it is required to evaluate their compliance with the capacity design criteria and their seismic energy dissipation capability. However, the design of the reinforcement of such beams usually lead to the adoption of large amount of steel within the panel zone which becomes potentially vulnerable to the effects of seismic cyclic actions and dramatically reduce the dissipation ca…