the main cause of structural damage in buildings subjected to seismic actions is lateral drift. in almost all reinforced concrete (rc) structures, whether designed with walls or frames, it is likely to be the code drift limits that control the design drift. the design drift limits and their contribution to damage may be represented indirectly through the material strain limits. the aim of this ...

this paper focuses on using the recently developed extended finite element model for buckling analysis of edge cracked columns under concentric axial load. the effect of crack depth and its location on the carrying capacity of columns is studied. the effect of different boundary conditions is also investigated. numerical examples are offered to show the efficiency and effectiveness of the propo...

Reinforcement grades higher than 75 ksi (520 MPa) are not allowed in members that form plastic hinges due to a lack of information on material characteristics and on the seismic performance of columns constructed with high-strength steel (HSS) reinforcement. This research investigated the performance of reinforced concrete columns containing Grade 80 (minimum yield strength of 80 ksi [550 MPa])...

T he late developmental neurobiologist, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Victor Hamburger told me during one of our discussions about the distinction between boring data and exciting concepts, ‘‘one can spend an entire lifetime correcting a flawed paper published in reputable journal and still loose the battle if people like the basic idea’’ (V. Hamburger, personal communicatio...

Strabismus induces an abnormal pattern of alternating light and dark columns of cytochrome oxidase (CO) activity in macaque striate cortex. This pattern may arise because visual perception is suppressed in one eye to avoid diplopia. To test whether CO activity is reduced in the ocular dominance columns of the suppressed eye, we performed monocular enucleation to co-label the ocular dominance co...

Under appropriate conditions, a column of viscous liquid falling onto a rigid surface undergoes a buckling instability. Here we show experimentally and theoretically that liquid buckling exhibits a hitherto unsuspected complexity involving three different modes-viscous, gravitational, and inertial-depending on how the viscous forces that resist bending of the column are balanced. We also find t...

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) transmission technique is gaining popularity as a preferred technique in the emerging broadband wireless access standards. Motivated by the OFDMA transmission technique we define the following problem: Let M be a matrix (over R) of size a × b. Given a vector of non-negative integers ~ C = 〈c1, c2, . . . , cb〉 such that ∑ cj = a, we would lik...

Distillation has remained an important separation technology for the chemical process industries. In 1997 it was reported in the journal Chemical Engineering that about 95% of all worldwide separation processes use this technology. In the USA alone, some 40000 distillation columns represent a capital investment of about US $8 billion. They consume the energy equivalent of approximately 1 billio...

Many problems in bioinformatics are about finding strings that approximately represent a collection of given strings. We look at more general problems where some input strings can be classified as outliers. The Close to Most Strings problem is, given a set S of same-length strings, and a parameter d, find a string x that maximizes the number of “non-outliers” within Hamming distance d of x. We ...