Elected Officials
Schools and organizations train engineers to use facts. But, engineers are often content to base decisions on their opinions. While engineering judgment is an important part of the professional...
Appendix B: Ten Primary Reasons for Failure in Negotiation
Back matter pages come after the papers or chapters in a published work. This back matter contains ten primary reasons for failure in negotiation....
Physical Model Testing of Broken Armor Stone
Cracking, breaking into two or more pieces, flaking, crumbling, and abrading may reduce an armor stone to a size where wave action can remove it from the structure causing a local instability....
L'Ambiance Plaza: What Have We Learned
In April 1987, a structure called L'Ambiance Plaza collapsed during construction, killing 28 workers. The building, in Bridgeport, Conn., was being built using the lift-slab...
Concrete Beam Testing with Optical Fiber Sensors
The use of an embedded multimode optical fiber to monitor curing and load-to-failure testing of a reinforced concrete beam has been investigated. The embedding process used to network...
A Critique of the Ultrasonic Pulse Velocity Method for Testing Concrete
The pulse velocity method is the most widely used ultrasonic nondestructive method for assessing concrete quality. However, it has been well established that the relation between ultrasonic...
Damage Dependent Micromechanics in Metal Matrix Composites
A computational approach is used herein to model the effects of processing induced thermal residual stresses on radial, hoop, and shear stresses at the fiber/matrix interface in a continuous...
Behaviour of Prestressed Concrete End Blocks
This paper briefly reports on a series of experiments carried out on strip-loaded prestressed concrete end blocks. The results show that corresponding design methods presently used in...
Particle Analysis of Material Behavior?A Note on Continuum Assumptions
Continuum models of materials have dominated our approach to the analysis of material behavior. Recently a number of discrete particle methods have been proposed which offer a different...
Fracture Toughness Model of Fiber Reinforced Ceramics
This paper addresses the fracture resistance mechanism in fiber reinforced ceramics, and focuses attention on the specific effects associated with the nonlinear nature of the fiber pullout...
Relationships Between Error Estimation and Adaptive Computations in Strain Localization
In this work, the a posteriori error estimates and the h mesh refinement techniques using hierarchical finite element shape functions are tailored for numerical simulations of strain localization...
Instability of Slopes with Nonassociated Flow
Experimental investigations of the conditions for instability have shown that granular materials may become unstable inside the failure surface. For states of stress below the failure...
Analysis of Internal Discontinuities in Geo-Materials
A new approach for modeling localized deformations is proposed. This approach uses an interface element to model the shear band. A successful capture of the kinematics of a failure mechanism...
Two-Dimensional Statistical Micromechanical Models for Microcracked Brittle Solids
Recent development undertaken by the authors in two-dimensional statistical micromechanical models for brittle solids with randomly located interacting microcracks is presented. Overall...
Computer Simulation of Direct Shear Test
This paper presents a pilot study of a computer simulation of direct shear test on sands using the Discrete Element Method. The numerical test setup is described first, which is followed...
Dugdale Model Applied to Crack Interactions
It is doubtful that modelling crack interactions problem within the context of elasticity adequately reflects the physical aspects as the failure of brittle material is approached. A model...
Contact Induced Damage
Contact induced damage is an important source of potential failure of engineering components. The particular applications where this damage occurs are in the automotive, aerospace and...
A Shear Locking Free Three-Node Triangular Plate Bending Element for Moderately-Thick and Thin Symmetrically Cross-Ply Laminated Plates
A shear locking free three-node triangular plate bending element based on Reissner/Mindlin theory for symmetric general cross-ply laminated plates is developed. The element has total nine...
Sensitivity of Lifeline Response to Models for the Spatial Incoherence of the Seismic Ground Motions
The sensitivity of the response of above-ground and buried lifelines to different models describing the spatial variability of the seismic ground motions is examined. It is shown that...
First-Passage Failure Predictions for Yielding Primary-Secondary Systems
Approximate methods are used to investigate the effect of nonnormality (non-Gaussianity) on the time of first-passage failure for a linear secondary system mounted on a yielding primary...
Return to search