Abstract Low mechanical resistance and high weight restrict use of natural stones in applications where tensile or flexural capacity is required together with a low weight, such as for long spans or thin sections (e.g., cladding, countertops, desktops). The use of composite laminates as external reinforcement both to increase the mechanical resistance and to decrease weight of natural stone is ...

The mode I interlaminar fracture toughness of stitched and unstitched composite laminates of continuous UD flax fiber and epoxy matrix was experimentally and numerically investigated. A twistless flax fiber yarn was used for stitching purpose. The mode I interlaminar energy release rate of the unstitched and stitched laminates was experimentally determined through Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) t...

According to the different construction forms of PBL shear connectors in steel-concrete composite beam and steel-concrete joint section, eight finite element models in two groups of the two construction forms are conducted to study different mechanical properties of PBL shear connectors. Following conclusions can be drawn from the finite element method calculation results. The load-slip curve, ...

The QoS-aware web service composition (WSC) problem aims at the fully automatic construction of a composite web service with the optimal accumulated QoS value. It is, however, intractable to solve the QoS-aware WSC problem for large scale instances since the problem corresponds to a global optimisation problem. That is, in the real world, traditional algorithms can require significant amount of...

We present a same-path polarization interferometer that uses two spatial light modulators to encode the most general type of Poincaré beam. We demonstrate this design by presenting new results on the encoding of symmetric C-point polarization singularities using spatial modes with high-order topological charges. We also present new results on composite C-points. These are cases where there are ...

An experimental and analytical research on shear buckling of a comparably large polymer composite I-section is presented. It is known that shear buckling load of a large span composite beam is difficult to determine experimentally. In order to sensitively detect shear buckling of the tested I-section, twenty strain rosettes and eight displacement sensors were applied and attached on the web and...

The article aims at constructing protective composite shields for breasts in chest computed tomography and investigating the effects of applying these new bismuth composites on dose and image quality. Polyurethane and silicon with 5% of bismuth were fabricated as a protective shield. At first, their efficiency in attenuating the X-ray beam was investigated by calculating the total attenuation c...

This research study focused on the long-term and repeated load behavior of wood-concrete composite beams in which the wood layer is composed of recycled utility poles. Previous research studies have found this type of a beam to have high efficiency and to be a potentially viable replacement for short span bridges on low traffic roadways. Since both wood and concrete exhibit time-dependent behav...

Structural health monitoring is a critical requirement in many composites. Numerous monitoring strategies rely on measurements of temperature or strain (or both), however these are often restricted to point-sensing or to the coverage of small areas. Spatially-continuous data can be obtained with optical fiber sensors. In this work, we report high-resolution distributed Brillouin sensing over st...

The present work studies the synthesis and performance of TiC/H13 tool steel composite coatings obtained by the laser deposition technique. he effect of laser beam-scanning speeds and the concentrations of TiC in injected powder on the morphologies and microstructures of deposited eads are investigated. The results show that the beam-scanning speeds affect the size and morphology of the beads. ...