Search results for "Civil Engineering"
showing 10 items of 1216 documents
The importance of OER in engineering education
2017
The problem of education is a very important one and occupies an increasingly wider register among educational specialists, who see these changes directly related to current generations of students. It speaks increasingly more and more about the desire of young people to learn when they want, how they want and how much they want, in their own way, without any constraints imposed by fixed educational program, established by teachers, according to their idea how to go on an educational route. In this context, open education provides crucial support of any person who is interested, and covered a complete and appropriate educational needs, in connection with time and availability of the person.…
Study regarding the physical-mechanical properties of knits for garments – pilling performance
2017
The effect of the pilling degradation results is an important decreasing in garment quality and a negative influence on the user’s comfort to wear. There are a lot factors, such as the yarn spinning system, fabric geometry and finishing operation, which affect the pilling performance. This research paper presents the investigation of fabric surface concerning pilling formation, especially knits, influenced by the fibrous composition. As samples were used knitted fabric panels, obtained from carded yarns, with fibers composition like cotton, wool or mixed one. Regarding fabric geometry 3 types were used – single jersey, 2x2 rib and moss stitch. In order to establish which of the yarns are mo…
An Original Approach to Active Climate Control Based on Equilibrium Moisture Content (EMC) as Set Point in a Middle-Age Building in Palermo, Italy
2019
In the frame of a more sustainable approach to climate control, a long term strategy has been developed and is under advanced phase of implementation by technical staff of the University of Palermo in an important building, Palazzo Steri, owned by the University. The monumental room under climate control, the Sala dei Baroni (also known as Sala Magna), has a precious wooden ceiling where the previously loadbearing elements are covered with wooden painted panels. Many of them, painted in the fourteenth c, underwent important restorations in the past due to climate related damage (cracks, warpings, paint layer delamination) and biological infestations. The room is currently undergoing an impo…
A Viscoelastic Model for the Long-Term Deflection of Segmental Prestressed Box Girders
2017
Most of segmental prestressed concrete box girders exhibit excessive multidecade deflections unforeseeable by past and current design codes. To investigate such a behavior, mainly caused by creep and shrinkage phenomena, an effective finite element (FE) formulation is presented in this article. This formulation is developed by invoking the stationarity of an energetic principle for linear viscoelastic problems and relies on the Bazant creep constitutive law. A case study representative of segmental prestressed concrete box girders susceptible to creep is also analyzed in the article, that is, the Colle Isarco viaduct. Its FE model, based on the aforementioned energetic formulation, was succ…
Towards General Purpose Object Detection: Deep Dense Grid Based Object Detection
2020
Object detection is one of the most challenging and very important branch of computer vision. Some of the challenging aspect of a detection network is the fact that an object can appear anywhere in the image, be partially occluded by another object, might appear in crowd or have greatly varying scales. Consequently, we propose a fine grained and equally spaced dense grid cells throughout an input image be responsible of detecting an object. We re-purpose an already existing deep state-of-the-art detector or classifier into deep and dense detector. Our dense object detector uses binary class encoding and hence suitable for very large multi-class object detector. We also propose a more flexib…
Computer vision and thermal monitoring of HMPE fibre rope condition during CBOS testing
2020
Abstract Fibre rope usage in deep sea lifting operations is gaining more prominence in recent times. With rope minimum break loads (MBL) comparable to that of their steel wire counterparts, the use of high modulus polyethylene (HMPE) ropes is seen as a viable option for use in subsea construction cranes. The ropes are worn out during use and visual inspection remains one of the main methods of determining whether a fibre rope is to be retired from use, therefore a natural extension is condition monitoring through computer vision. Creep and temperature are constraining with HMPE ropes and should be monitored continuously, particularly when the rope is cyclically bent over sheaves. Additional…
Modular fastening system and tool–holder working unit for incremental forming
2019
Incremental forming can be usually unfolded either on CNC milling machine–tools or serial industrial robots. The approach proposed in this paper tackles the problem of designing a modular fastening system, which can be adapted for both above mentioned technological equipment. The fastening system of the sheet–metal workpiece is composed of a fixing plate and a retaining plate. The fixing and retaining plates will be made up of different individual elements, which can be easily repositioned to obtain different sizes of the part. Moreover, the fastening system has to be able to be positioned either horizontally (to be fitted on CNC milling machines) or vertically (to be fitted on industrial r…
Wireless communication based on Raspberry pi and Codesys for mobile robots using IoT technology
2021
The industrial environment is going through exponential changes, due to the diversity of technological solutions that appear more and more frequently and the increase of productivity at increasing capacities. Due to this fact in the industrial area the number of devices, processing systems, collaborative robots, mobile robots and industrial equipment is increasing more and more. Consequently, there is a need for communication and connectivity of entities, common physical or virtual functioning and decision making, all of which are fundamental to the transition to the new concept of Industry 4.0. This study presents how wireless communication can be achieved in a mobile robotic platform that…
Investigation of buckling characteristics of cracked variable stiffness composite plates by an eXtended Ritz approach
2021
Abstract Variable Angle Tow (VAT) composite plates are characterized by in-plane variable stiffness properties, which opens to new concepts of stiffness tailoring and optimization to achieve higher structural performance for advanced lightweight structures where damage tolerance consideration are often mandatory. In this paper, a single-domain eXtended Ritz formulation is proposed to study the buckling behaviour of variable stiffness laminated cracked plates. The plate behaviour is described by the first order shear deformation theory whose generalized displacements, namely reference plane translations and rotations, are expressed via suitable admissible trial functions. These consist of a …
The benefits of inclusive education: new challenges for university teachers
2017
Inclusive education is a child’s right, not a privilege. The amount of current attention given to children and to childhood is unprecedented. In a world affected by financial crises, attitudes about children’s needs are very important. Recent years have seen innovations in the focus of research, as political moves that challenge the ways different children have been excluded and silenced. Inclusive education is a real and urgent need for all educational systems around the world. Inside our university, the Teachers Training Department needs to take serious measures to create a professional environment for all the students involved in the initial training for becoming teachers at all levels. …