Serving as one key component of the most important lifeline infrastructure system, transmission towers are vulnerable to multiple nature hazards including strong wind and could pose severe threats to the power system security with possible blackouts under extreme weather conditions, such as hurricanes, derechoes, or winter storms. For the security and resiliency of the power system, it is impor...

Debonding problems of externally bonded fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) sheets in flexurally FRP-strengthened reinforced concrete (RC) beams have been a concern and a research challenge since their application of this strengthening technique. Intermediate crack induced debonding is the most common failure mode which is that the debonding initiates at the critical flexural-shear or flexural crack...

With today’s Virtual Reality (VR) systems, it is difficult to directly and precisely create and modify objects in a VR environment. This chapter presents an approach for solid modelling in a VR environment. Solid modelling in the VR environment is performed precisely in an intuitive manner through constraint-based manipulations. A hierarchically structured and constraint-based data model is dev...

We consider a family of explicit compact schemes for advection in one dimension. The order is arbitrarily high. These stencils may be called Strang’s stencils after the seminal work of Strang [J. Math. Phys., 41 (1962), pp. 147–154]. We prove that odd order schemes are stable in all Lq under CFL one. The strategy of the proof is similar to the one of Thomée [J. Differential Equations, 1 (1965),...

In this paper we analyze the bi-conjugate gradient algorithm in finite precision arithmetic, and suggest reasons for its often observed robustness. By using a tridiagonal structure, which is preserved by the finite precision bi-conjugate gradient iteration, we are able to bound its residual norm by a minimum polynomial of a perturbed matrix (i.e. the residual norm of the exact GMRES applied to ...

Primary brain tumors of glial origin often overexpress epidermal growth factor receptors (EGF-Rs). This may be associated with amplifi cation of the EGF-R gene. We have examined tissue from 23 glioblastoma multiforme tumors and found amplification and rearrangement of the EGF-R gene in four of these. The cytoplasmic domain of the EGF-R gene was invariably amplified in these four tumors, while t...

The transmembrane tyrosine kinase mesenchymal-epidermal transition (MET) receptor and its ligand, hepatocyte growth factor, also known as scatter factor, have recently been identified as novel promising targets in several human malignancies, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Amplification, mutation, or overexpression of the MET gene can result in aberrant activation of the MET axis,...