Abstract—It is a major challenge to build a bridge superstructure that has long-term durability and low maintenance requirements. A solution to this challenge may be to use new materials or to implement new structural systems. Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composites have continued to play an important role in solving some of persistent problems in infrastructure applications because of its hi...

A ‘‘smart’’ base isolation strategy is proposed and shown to effectively protect structures against extreme earthquakes without sacrificing performance during the more frequent, moderate seismic events. The proposed smart base isolation system is composed of conventional low-damping elastomeric bearings and ‘‘smart’’ controllable ~semiactive! dampers, such as magnetorheological fluid dampers. T...

Themajor revision work for UML 2.0 is complete, and it is now an OMG Final Adopted Specification. This is a good time to reflect on UML’s future, and the future of modeldriven development. In April 2003 the U2 Partners submission team completed the final editing changes to the third revision of its Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0 Superstructure proposal, and submitted it to the Object Manag...

We extract from sentences a superstructure made of argumentative operators and connectives applying to the remaining set of terminal sub-sentences. We found the argumentative interpretation of utterances on a semantics defined at the linguistic level. We describe the computation of this particular semantics, based on the constraints that the superstructure impels to the argumentative power of t...

Biodiesel is a promising fuel alternative compared to traditional diesel obtained from conventional sources such as fossil fuel. Many flowsheet alternatives exist for the production of biodiesel and therefore it is necessary to evaluate these alternatives using defined criteria and also from process intensification opportunities. This work focuses on three main aspects that have been incorporat...

In this study, a seismic isolator placed on the base of structure was optimized under various earthquake records using an adaptive harmony search algorithm (AHS). As known, base-isolation systems with very low stiffness provide rigid response superstructure, so it assumed that is and base-isolated can be considered as single-degree freedom structure. By assumption, optimization method independe...

A new cavity-chain layout has been proposed for the main linac of the TESLA linear collider [1]. This superstructure-layout is based upon four 7-cell superconducting standing-wave cavities, coupled by short beam pipes. The main advantages of the superstructure are an increase in the active accelerating length in TESLA and a saving in rf components , especially power couplers, as compared to the...