The web of plate girders in bridges are usually reinforced by welded transverse stiffeners in order to improve their shear capacity.Due to problems associated with field welding and fatigue, welded stiffeners are not suitable for retrofitting existing bridges. Bolted stiffeners are a practical alternative for strengthening girders that are expected to experience shear stress in excess of their ...

Bridges, as an essential part of transportation system, play a special role in economy, politic and military all around the world. Serviceability of bridges is of high importance especially in emergencies, helping injured people and proportioning transportation after earthquakes. Earthquake regulation codes, normally suggest linear methods to conduct the analysis, and nonlinear analysis is bare...

Capillary bridges are usually formed by a small liquid volume in a confined space between two solid surfaces. They can have a lower internal pressure than the surrounding pressure for volumes of the order of femtoliters. Femtoliter capillary bridges with relatively rapid evaporation rates are difficult to explore experimentally. To understand in detail the evaporation of femtoliter capillary br...

Deterioration of bridges in the United States has been well recognized. According to the FHWA National Bridge Inventory, one third of nearly 600,000 U.S. highway bridges are classified as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Since the majority of bridges were built using wood, steel or concrete, the same conventional materials have been used for bridge replacement or rehabilitation,...

In the design of bridges with large spans, the significant values of the moments at the main deck-structure require very heavy members, either in the case of a beam or a truss deck-structure. In order to minimize the influence of bending moments, several applications of passive control of displacements using cable nets are herein proposed. The base for all the proposed systems is the cables sup...

The main aim of the dissertation is to present a way for de ning bicategories, double categories, lax and colax functors between them, where the coherence pentagon and the lax comparison cells are implicitly encoded in the system. Besides this, we also study related structures such as Morita contexts. For bicategories we follow Tom Leinster's unbiased approach, and we use profunctors regarded a...

Protein thermal stability is an important factor considered in medical and industrial applications. Many structural characteristics related to protein thermal stability have been elucidated, and increasing salt bridges is considered as one of the most efficient strategies to increase protein thermal stability. However, the accurate simulation of salt bridges remains difficult. In this study, a ...

Insulin hormone is an important part of the endocrine system. It contains two polypeptide chains and plays a pivotal role in regulating carbohydrate metabolism. Insulin receptors (IR) located on cell surface interacts with insulin to control the intake of glucose. Although several studies have tried to clarify the interaction between insulin and its receptor, the mechanism of this interaction r...