The AASHTO Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) pavement performance models and the associated AASHTOWare® Pavement ME Design software are nationally calibrated using design inputs and distress data largely from the national Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP). Further calibration and validation studies are necessary for local highway agencies’ implementation by taking into acc...

Cracking furnace system is the starting and the most critical sector of an ethylene plant where heavier components are cracked into lighter products, such as ethylene, propylene, and etc. During the production, coking can adversely affect the manufacturing performance, such that furnaces have to be decoked for some controlled time. The cracking and decoking processes both influence the plant pr...

Article history: Received: 08.10.2013. Received in revised form: 21.11.2013. Accepted: 25.11.2013. This study presents a cellular automata (CA) method to map the cracking patterns of laterally loaded masonry wall panels with openings. Firstly, the central point displacement of each CA cell is calculated from the finite element method (FEM). Then, the displacements are normalized to form the CA ...

Abstract:This paper addresses the short-term scheduling problem for the ethylene cracking process with feedstocks and energy constraints. The cracking production of ethylene is a process with units that have decaying performance, requiring periodic cleanup to restore their performance. Under the condition of limited feedstocks, the production operating mode of the cracking furnaces is to keep y...

At the age of 3.5 years, wild chimpanzees at Bossou, Guinea, begin to use hammer and anvil stones to crack oil-palm nuts to get the kernels. To clarify the developmental processes, the authors did a field experiment in which stones and oil-palm nuts were provided. Infant chimpanzees' stone-nut manipulation was observed and video recorded. Data were collected from 3 infants younger than 4 years ...

abstract the usage of heroin is associated with a variety of neurologic disorders, including acute transverse myelitis. in this study we present a 19 year old man who was suffered from insufflated heroin after several months of abstinence, and admitted to hospital emergency department, unconscious. he responded to fluid therapy and naloxone, but could not move his legs on examination. he had fl...

• The novel measurement procedure presented is a cost-effective alternative for measuring the transverse-to-longitudinal deformation ratio of polymeric macro-fibres. low cost equipment and simplicity allows its implementation in large-scale fibre design optimization processes. This study reports first ratios macro-fibres commonly used structural concrete. transversal variable non-uniform along ...

Abstract This paper concerns an investigation on six large-scale Steel Fiber Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) beams tested in pure torsion. All had longitudinal rebars to facilitate the well-known space truss resisting mechanism. However, order promote economic use of material, transverse reinforcement (i.e. stirrups/links) was varied large scale beams. The latter contained either no stirrups, or min...

Article history: Received: 11.03.2013. Received in revised form: 02.04.2013. Accepted: 02.04.2013. This paper puts forward an innovative criterion in the cellar automata (CA) technique for both matching zone similarity and mapping failure pattern of masonry wall panel. The criterion proposed in this paper is a two-step matching method. Firstly, calculate the state values of the cells in the bas...