Search results for "Civil and Structural Engineering"
showing 10 items of 1404 documents
Thermofluid-dynamic assessment of the EU-DEMO divertor single-circuit cooling option
2023
Until 2019, the thermo-hydraulic development of the EU-DEMO divertor was based on the “double-circuit” concept, in which two independent cooling circuits served by two different Primary Heat Transfer Systems were used to cool the Plasma-Facing Components (PFC) and the Cassette Body (CB). During the Divertor Final Design Review Meeting, held in May 2020, the possibility to adopt a single cooling circuit to serve both components was suggested. This new cooling circuit was originally conceived with the aim of simplifying remote maintenance, with potential benefits for some aspects of safety and balance of plant design and integration. During the years from 2020 to 2022, in the fram…
Influence of the quadratic term in the alongwind stochastic response of SDOF structures
1996
A parametric study, regarding the influence of the quadratic pressure term, which is often neglected in the literature, on the stochastic alongwind response of a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) structure subjected to wind action, is presented. The results are reported in terms of percentages of difference in the evaluation of the response, by considering and neglecting the quadratic pressure term. The changing parameters considered are: the terrain drag coefficient, the structure height, the structure natural radian frequency, the structure damping coefficient and the wind reference mean velocity. The response stochastic analysis has been carried out in the time domain, by means of the mome…
Ductility of Reinforced Concrete Members Externally Wrapped with Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Sheets
2007
The effectiveness of external wrapping with fiber-reinforced polymer for enhancing the curvature ductility of lightly reinforced concrete members is investigated. Referring to members with circular transverse cross sections, the performances in terms of both strength and ductility capacities are analyzed, and the predictive reliability of two different recent constitutive models, available in the literature and able to take into account the softening behavior of confined concrete, is checked. A parameter characterizing the effectiveness of the confining wrapping is proposed, and characteristic values are suggested. Moreover, referring to ductility increases due to confinement effects, a com…
Mode-superposition correction method for deterministic and stochastic analysis of structural systems
2001
The role played by the modal analysis in the framework of structural dynamics is fundamental from both deterministic and stochastic point of view. However the accuracy obtained by means of the classical modal analysis is not always satisfactory. Therefore it is clear the importance of methods able to correct the modal response in such a way to obtain the required accuracy. Many methods have been proposed in the last years but they are meaningful only when the forcing function is expressed by an analytical function. Moreover in stochastic analysis they fail for white noise excitation. In the paper a method able to give a very accurate response for both deterministic and stochastic input is p…
In-Depth Analysis of Pricing Problem Relaxations for the Capacitated Arc-Routing Problem
2015
Recently, Bode and Irnich [Bode C, Irnich S (2012) Cut-first branch-and-price-second for the capacitated arc-routing problem. Oper. Res. 60(5):1167–1182] presented a cut-first branch-and-price-second algorithm for solving the capacitated arc-routing problem (CARP). The fundamental difference to other approaches for exactly solving the CARP is that the entire algorithm works directly on the typically sparse underlying graph representing the street network. This enables the use of highly efficient dynamic programming-based pricing algorithms to solve the column-generation subproblem also known as the pricing problem. The contribution of this paper is the in-depth analysis of the CARP pricing…
Effective Handling of Dynamic Time Windows and Its Application to Solving the Dial-a-Ride Problem
2015
A dynamic time window relates to two operations that must be executed within a given time meaning that the difference between the points in time when the two operations are performed is bounded from above. The most prevalent context of dynamic time windows is when precedence is given for the two operations so that it is a priori specified that one operation must take place before the other. A prominent vehicle routing problem with dynamic time windows and precedence is the dial-a-ride problem (DARP), where user-specified transportation requests from origin to destination points must be serviced. The paper presents a new branch-and-cut-and-price solution approach for the DARP, the prototypi…
A perturbation approach for the response of dynamically modified structural systems
1998
The problem of the structural analysis under changes of dynamical parameters is of particular interest. This is due to the fact that often the real structures are different from the predicted ones. In this paper, an unconditionally stable step-by-step procedure, able to evaluate the deterministic response of linear structures with modifications, is presented. The proposed procedure requires the evaluation of the transition matrix, which is the fundamental operator of the step-by-step solution, by means of a perturbation approach. This technique overcomes the difficulties connected with the evaluation of the eigenproperties of the modified structures usually required to obtain the transition…
Seismic behavior of exterior RC beam-column joints without code-specified ties in the joint core
2021
Abstract Beam-column joint design for reinforced concrete (RC) buildings is a critical issue for modern earthquake engineering, because for these structural elements, the current codes provide several geometrical constraints and reinforcement provisions, which may be very complex to implement during the construction phase. To investigate how a construction error might influence the joint behavior, two identical full-scale exterior beam-column joints specimens are built, according to Italian Building Code specifications for the high ductility class, but without the required horizontal ties inside the joint panel. This construction error could be plausible because, according to the design dra…
Mediterranean Coastal Lagoons Review: Sites to Visit before Disappearance
2022
Coastal lagoons are an established priority habitat in the European environment because of the biological communities that inhabit them. Their origin is related to the transport of sediments from a nearby river or the movement of sands by the marine currents that produce the closure of a gulf. Therefore, they are recent geological formations, which also disappear quickly if environmental conditions change. The 37 coastal lagoons with a surface area greater than 10 km2 located in the Mediterranean basin have been identified. Fishing has been the traditional use of these lagoons, in addition to their use as a navigation harbor when they are open to the sea. Pollution, quality problems and the…
Rail freight transport and demand requirements : an analysis of attribute cut-offs through a stated preference experiment
2014
This paper analyses the choice between road and rail in Spain where rail market share for freight is still residual. Discrete choice models are estimated with data obtained through a two-phase fieldwork, thus allowing us to carry out a stated preference efficient design for each interviewee. We analyse the existence of attribute cut-offs and the presence of a segment of the population with a zero value of frequency. Our results show that ignoring the existence of cut-offs and segments of the population with polarised valuations can lead to erroneous conclusions in terms of the possibilities of rail for absorbing significant quota.