Search results for "Structural Engineering"
showing 10 items of 1998 documents
Experimental Evidence of Leaks in Elastic Pipes
2016
Several studies have been carried out in recent decades to establish a relationship between total head and leaks. In literature, the leakage governing equations have been analysed in light of pipe materials, water head, leak dimension or shape. Most of these contributions questioned the classical Torricelli equation, demonstrating through experimental evidence that the classical orifice law can give unsatisfactory results. Nevertheless, starting from the Torricelli equation, other exponential or linear governing equations have been proposed as mathematical models able to reproduce the leakages in water distribution systems (WDSs). To investigate the validity of the proposed governing equati…
Six-years-long effects of the Italian policies for photovoltaics on the pay-back period of grid-connected PV systems installed in urban contexts
2017
Abstract In this study the discounted pay-back (DPB) period of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems installed in urban contexts was investigated during the course of time with the aim of evaluating the effects of the different supporting policies enacted by the Italian government. The profitability of the investment in three Italian cities was observed from June 2010 to May 2016 by means of an exhaustive economic analysis based on the study of the variation of the costs and benefits during the lifetime of the investment. The analysis considered the disbursements for the PV system devices, maintenance and management, insurance, and wear of PV panels and inverters. Other significant parameters, …
Urban morphology detection and it's linking with land surface temperature: A case study for Tehran Metropolis, Iran
2021
Abstract Expansion of urban areas and alteration of natural land cover exacerbate the local climate change. To find out the effect of land cover changes on the local climate, in this study, the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) concept was utilized to detect urban morphology in Tehran Metropolis. LCZ and Land Surface Temperature (LST) can be identified and classified based on available remote sensing products. Firstly, LCZ maps of Tehran metropolis were extracted using Landsat imagery, and secondly, relationships between LCZ and LST were explored for three years (1990, 2004, and 2018). We found that Tehran urban structure has 13 LCZs based on imagery from Landsat 5 and 14 LCZs based on images for La…
Waterfront Redevelopment in Post-America’s Cup Valencia: Some Insights from a Survey to Local Residents
2018
AbstractWaterfront renewal is a recurrent event in the life of many cities around the world. Traditionally, planners and geographers have focused on this phenomenon analyzing the ongoing relationsh...
Comparison of numerical modelling techniques for impact investigation on a wind turbine blade
2019
Wind turbine blades are exposed to numerous impact risks throughout their lifetimes. The impact risks range from bird collisions during operation to impacts with surrounding structures at the time of transportation and installation. Impact loads on the fibre composite blades can induce several complex, simultaneously interacting and visually undetectable damage modes and have a high potential to reduce the local and global blade stiffness. An assessment of such impact-induced damages is therefore necessary and usually involves high computational costs using numerical procedures, especially when analysing large composite components. To minimise this computational expense, different numerical…
Numerical investigation of rain droplet impact on offshore wind turbine blades under different rainfall conditions: A parametric study
2020
The leading edge of a fiber composite wind turbine blade (WTB) is prone to erosion damages due to repeated rain droplet impact during its service life. Such damages are critical to the blade's aerodynamic as well as structural performance, ultimately resulting in substantial repair costs. An effective design of a coating material for WTB is necessary and its analysis must include variables associated with erosive rain droplets such as (1) droplet diameter, (2) impact velocity, and (3) droplet impact angle. The present paper develops and validates a coupled fluid structure interaction (FSI) computational model for simulating rain droplet impact on WTBs, where the structure domain is modelled…
Uncertainty analysis of life cycle assessment of asphalt surfacings
2023
The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of asphalt pavements are associated with significant uncertainty resulting from variability in the quantity and impact of individual components, the quality of data for each component, and variability of asphalt durability. This study presents a framework to quantify and incorporate the uncertainty of LCA and asphalt durability data into LCA of asphalt surfacings. The suggested framework includes: estimating the uncertainty of asphalt production processes by the pedigree matrix method, conducting a deterministic LCA, applying Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to estimate the probability density functions (PDFs) of the considered impacts using the uncertainty data,…
Design and manufacturing feasibility of ITER TBM Frame and Dummy TBMs
2016
Abstract The operation and test of mock-ups of tritium breeding blankets relevant for a future commercial reactor is one of the goals of the ITER machine. To accomplish this goal, mock-ups of breeding blankets, called Test Blanket Modules (TBMs), are installed in three ITER equatorial ports. Each TBM and the associated shield form a TBM-set that is mechanically attached to a steel frame called TBM Frame. A Frame and two TBM-Sets form a TBM Port Plug (TBM PP). The ITER Organization is responsible for the design and manufacture of the TBM Frames and of the Dummy TBMs that could replace the TBM-sets in case they were not available. This paper describes the recent results of the design supporti…
Innovative straight formulation for plate in bending
2017
In this paper it has been introduced an innovative formulation for evaluating the deflection function of a simply supported plate loaded by uniformly distributed edge moments. Framed into Line Element-less Method, this formulation allows the evaluation of solution in terms of deflection, through few lines of algorithm implemented by Mathematica software without resorting to any discretization neither in the domain nor in the boundary. Interesting savings in terms of time and computational costs are achieved. Results obtained by the proposed method are well contrasted by ones obtained by classical methods and Finite Element Method.
Design optimization for the quench protection of DTT's superconducting toroidal field magnets
2021
Abstract The paper is focused on the optimal design of Fast Discharge Unit (FDU) for the quench protection of the Toroidal Field (TF) magnets of the Divertor Tokamak Test facility (DTT), an experimental facility under construction in ENEA Frascati Research Centre (Rome, Italy). The FDU is a safety key component that protects the superconducting magnets when a quench is detected through the fast extraction of the energy stored in the magnets by adding a discharge dump resistor (DR) in the TF magnets circuit. A comparison between a fixed DR and a switched variable DR has been implemented by changing resistor parameters and by using multiple current control of the power electronics components …