In arid and semi-arid ecosystems, shrubs may act as fertility islands but theireffect may vary depending on their morphology and ecological impacts. This research wasaimed to study effect of three shrubs Scariola orientalis, Astragalus heratensis, and Rosapersica on soil properties and on the microclimate conditions (temperature, luminance, andsoil moisture) of their understory in the steppe ra...

Dibutyl phthalate (DBP) is a phthalic acid ester and is widely used in polymeric products to make them more flexible. DBP is found in almost every plastic material and is believed to be persistent in the environment. Various analytical methods have been used to measure DBP in different matrices. Considering the ubiquitous nature of DBP, the most important challenge in DBP analyses is the contam...

Asphalt modification/reinforcement has received considerable attention as viable solutions to enhance flexible pavement performance. This is mainly prompted by the unsatisfactory performance of traditional road materials exposed to dramatic increases and changes in traffic patterns. This paper presents the evaluation of fatigue behaviour of nano reinforced Stone Mastic Asphalt mixtures. Fatigue...

Cooperative object manipulation control of rigid-flexible multi-body systems in space is studied in this paper. During such tasks, flexible members like solar panels may get vibrated that in turn may lead to some oscillatory disturbing forces on other subsystems, and consequently produces error in the motion of the end-effectors of the cooperative manipulating arms. Therefore, to design and dev...

this paper studies the effect of flexible linear torso on the dynamics of passive quadruped bounding. a reduced-order passive and conservative model with linear flexible torso and springy legs is introduced. the model features extensive spine deformation during high-speed bounding, resembling those observed in a cheetah. fixed points corresponding to cyclic bounding motions are found and calcul...

We introduce an agility measure enabling the comparison of two very di↵erent leaping-from-rest transitions by two comparably powered but morphologically di↵erent legged robots. We use the measure to show that a flexible spine outperforms a rigid back in the leapingfrom-rest task. The agility measure also sheds light on the source of this benefit: core actuation through a su ciently powerful par...

In this paper we consider three measures of overlap, namelyMatusia’s measure ρ, Morisita’s measure λ and Weitzman’s measure∆. These measures are usually used in quantitative ecology and stress-strength models of reliability analysis. Herein we consider two Weibull distributions having the same shape parameter and different scale parameters. This distribution is known to be the most flexible lif...