The promotion of sustainable practice in construction has resulted a renewed focus on local building materials (LBMs). However, existing studies have not provided an extensive understanding the challenges use and awareness availability LBMs. In this study, we examine environmental performance LBMs South Africa. Based review related literature, questionnaire survey was undertaken to collect data...

The simulation of fracture using continuum ductile damage models attains a pathological discretization dependence caused by strain localization, after loss ellipticity the problem, in regions whose size is connected to spatial discretization. Implicit gradient techniques suppress this problem introducing some inelastic non-local fields and solving an enriched formulation where classical balance...

We consider the following special problem related to the optimal layout problems of materials: Given two elastic materials, C 1 and C 2 the corresponding elasticity tensors, and a force ~ f, nd the strong closure of strains and stresses as the distribution of the materials varies or, alternatively, nd the sets of elasticity tensors which generate these strong closures. In this paper, it is show...

Positron annihilation spectroscopy is often used to analyze the local electronic structure of materials of technological interest. Reliable theoretical tools are crucial to interpret the measured spectra. Here, we propose a parameter-free gradient correction scheme for a local-density approximation obtained from high-quality quantum Monte Carlo data. The results of our calculations compare favo...

A fast numerical algorithm to compute the local and overall responses of nonlinear periodic composite materials is developed. This alternative formulation allows us to improve the convergence of the existing method of Moulinec and Suquet [1], [2]. In the present method a nonlinear elastic (or conducting) material is replaced by infinitely many locally linear thermoelastic materials with moduli ...

INTRODUCTION Clinical trials of new vaginal products require careful communication with participants about trial requirements. Most microbicide trials have been multi-site studies conducted among women in sub-Saharan Africa, where literacy levels and understanding of scientific methods differ from those designing and conducting the trials. Microbicide trials require women to insert objects in t...