directional simulation, among techniques for reliability analysis of engineering structures, is well known. in this context, directional simulation in load space, because of the considerable advantages of lower dimension of working space, is of considerable interest. as is expected due to structural resistance variability, the location of the relevant limit state(s) is no longer constant and mu...

in this paper, a method based on binary-coded genetic algorithm is proposed to explore an optimization method, for obtaining an optimal elliptical tank. this optimization method enhances the rollover threshold of a tank vehicle, especially under partial filling conditions. minimizing the overturning moment imposed on the vehicle due to c.g. height of the liquid load, lateral acceleration and ca...

Friction coefficient and wear rate of different steel materials are investigated and compared in this study. In order to do so, a pin on disc apparatus is designed and fabricated. Experiments are carried out when different types of disc materials such as stainless steel 314 (SS 314), stainless steel 202 (SS 202) and mild steel slide against stainless steel 314 (SS 314) pin. Experiments are cond...

This paper presents two main results. The first result indicates that in materials with broadly distributed microscopic heterogeneities, the fracture strength distribution corresponding to the peak load of the material response does not follow the commonly used Weibull and (modified) Gumbel distributions. Instead, a lognormal distribution describes more adequately the fracture strengths corresp...

We test the scaling properties of a recently proposed improved lattice-fermion action, the fat link clover action, for lattice spacing a = 0.09 and 0.16 fm. The action scales as well as the conventional nonperturbatively improved clover action. Tests done at small quark mass on quenched lattices of lattice spacing 0.12 fm show that it has fewer problems with pathological lattice artifacts (“exc...