In spite of the advent of new materials, clay bricks remain, arguably, the most popular construction materials today. Nevertheless the low cost and versatility of clay bricks cannot always be associated with high environmental and sustainable values, especially in terms of raw material sources and manufacturing processes. At the same time, the worldwide agricultural footprint is fast growing, w...

This paper introduces a new method of calculating the expected improvement infill criterion, which does not rely on accurate model parameter estimation. The parameter estimation is embedded within the search of the infill criterion, wherein parameter changes are assessed using likelihood ratio tests. Unlike the traditional expected improvement, a new formulation we present cannot be ‘fooled’ by...

The measurements of activity concentration of uranium, thorim and potassium were carried out in radiation shielding bricks, granites, soil, hematite, bricks, and sand by using a high resolution high purity Germanium (HPGe) gamma-ray spectrometer system. The activity concentrations of uranium, thorium and potassium contents are 80 ± 5 Bq/kg, 103±10 Bq/kg and 1014±15 Bq/kg, respectively in radiat...

With the rapid expansion of e-commerce, trust has become a central research topic in online environment for its key role in affecting e-commerce success. Our study focuses on the initial online trust building for brick-and-click companies. Building upon social learning theory, we propose a framework to examine the learning processes and important antecedents to online trust building. To demonst...

A brick is a 3-connected graph such that the graph obtained from it by deleting any two distinct vertices has a perfect matching. A brick is minimal if for every edge e the deletion of e results in a graph that is not a brick. We prove a generation theorem for minimal bricks and two corollaries: (1) for n ≥ 5, every minimal brick on 2n vertices has at most 5n − 7 edges, and (2) every minimal br...

Mining tailings as a raw material for preparing autoclaved bricks have attracted much attention. The tailings subjected to milling always have the characteristic of fine granularity. However, the proportion of the fine aggregates in autoclaved bricks was very low using the current gradation formula, which impeded the utilization of the tailings. In this work, a novel model of aggregate gradatio...

The brick Chapel at St. Mary’s City, Maryland, built around 1667, would have been an impressive structure on a colonial frontier where all the other buildings were built only of wood. While the building is no longer extant, the bricks remaining in the buried foundations hold information about the technologies and materials used by brickmakers in the 17th-century Chesapeake region. Instrumental ...

The direct modeling of masonry infill walls on many buildings, based damage recorded by various past earthquakes, has become increasingly necessary in order to identify the seismic behavior these elements, which constitute an important part reinforced concrete buildings. In this paper, several 3D models were analyzed nonlinear static (pushover) method, when ignoring, and considering, walls. fin...

Received Apr 3, 2012 Revised May 19, 2012 Accepted June 4, 2012 The research assessed and examined the mechanical properties of the Soil Cement Interlocking brick (SCI) to provide the information for the possible and appropriate development and revision of the (SCI) brick due to the substantial benefits which can be obtained by improving these sorts of bricks .Therefore, drastic efforts and acc...