the quality of plant stocks in the nursery has proven to be a key determinant factor in precocity of fruit bearing period and the size of tree crops. the quality of these trees is related to growth strength of the applied rootstock, the tendency of the cultivars to produce branches, the growth season's weather conditions as well as the efficiency of different treatments stimulating branchi...

Dampers can reduce structural response under dynamic loads. Since dampers are costly, the design of structures equipped with dampers should make their application economically justifiable. Among the effective cost reduction factors is optimal damper placement. Hence, this study intended to find the optimal viscous damper placement using efficient optimization methods. Taking into account the no...

Formation of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) represents a transfer of upper layer water to abyssal depths at a rate of 15 to 20 x 10 6 m3/s. NADW spreads throughout the Atlantic Ocean and is exported to the Indian and Pacific Oceans by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and deep western boundary currents. Naturally, there must be a compensating flow of upper layer water toward the northern Nort...

The evolution of bridge pier scour is very important for bridge safety warning and assessment. During typhoon seasons in Taiwan, the torrential river flow often causes scour monitoring instruments to fail in their attempt to measure the temporal variations of pier scour depths. To better understand the scouring phenomenon during a large flood event, this study proposes a fast and reliable metho...

An analytical model has been developed for the pressure waveform radiated underwater when an offshore steel pipe pile is struck by a hammer. The model is based on the coupled equations of motion for axial and radial vibration of a thin shell and yields frequency-dependent phase velocity and attenuation of these vibrations. A harmonic solution is obtained for the radiated sound pressure, using J...

Schematic Skew-T soundings can be used to estimate the depth of elevated mixed layers and their origins thousands of kilometers downstream from their source regions. Focus is on the elevated mixed layer from the Sahara, the Saharan Air Layer (SAL), and its relationship to aerosol optical depth. Aerosol optical depth (AOD) measurements and SAL depth determined from atmospheric soundings were tab...