Tackling Trapped Sediments
Crater-sink fluidization has been used to recover sediment from harbors for the past couple of decades. Can this method bypass sediment around dams and return it to eroded beaches, solving...
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...
Motown Tunneling
When finished in 1993, Wayne County Michigan's $69 million wastewater treatment/sewer project will link outlying areas such as Dearborn with sewage treatment facilities in...
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...
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...
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...
Turbulence, and Energy Loss, at Combining Pipe Junctions
Efforts to measure and describe the loss of energy at 90? sharp-edged junctions are described. The work is focussed on energy losses at discharge and area ratios for which there are no...
General Mechanism of Turbulence
By considering the vortex structures of turbulence and using the concept and theory of the pulsative convection and diffusion of instantaneous vorticity in a viscous fluid motion, the...
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...
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...
First Order Importance Sampling Method and its Variance Reduction
This paper proposes an Importance Sampling method for structural system reliability problems with linearized modal failure surfaces. It has the advantage of locating all samples in the...
Evolution of Damage in Brazilian Test Using Holographic Interferometry
A common method for estimating the tensile strength of concrete is the Brazilian Test. The test is carried out by loading a cylinder on its side in diametral compression. Accodring to...
Random Initial Heterogeneity and Degradation in Brittle Materials
The question of implementation of the initial state of the material is addressed. The problem is tackled by assuming random initial values for a relevant variable, within a prespecified...
On the Role of Dispersive Waves in Strain-Softening Media
Wave propagation in strain-softening continua is investigated numerically and analytically. It is argued that localisation which typically acts as a precursor of failure, can only be described...
Retrospect and Prospect: Micromechanics
In the mechanics community the term micromechanics is often used to identify scientific efforts in which certain overall macroscopic material response and failure modes are characterized...
Return to search