1,721,051 research outputs found
Research and Applications in Unsaturated Soil Mechanics
No full textThis Special Issue (n. 165 of the International Journal Engineering Geology) collects a review of the most recent developments in the mechanics of unsaturated soils, and a perspective on geological, geo-environmental and geotechnical problems to which unsaturated soil mechanics provides a comprehensive framework.
The papers included in the Issue are the written version of the invited contributions to the Second European Conference on Unsaturated Soils, E-UNSAT 2012, held in Napoli, Italy, on June 2012. The conference was supported by the Technical Committee 106 - Unsaturated Soils of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering.
The twelve papers address the three thematic areas Experimental, Modelling, and Engineering, in which the contemporary activity may be broadly encompassed, and is intended to provide a valuable up-to-date reference across the subject for both researchers and practitioners
Unsaturated soils: research and applications
No full textThe CD contains the papers presented at the Second European Conference on Unsaturated Soils, E-UNSAT 2012, held in Napoli, Italy, in June 2012. The event is the second of a series of European conferences, born on initiative of the researchers involved in the EU FP6 MUSE – Mechanics of Unsaturated Soils for Engineering – Research and Training Network, and follows the first successful one, organised in Durham, UK, in 2008. The conference series was then supported by Technical Committee 106 of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering on Unsaturated Soils, which is very active in promoting new opportunities to bring together researchers and practitioners to share advances in unsaturated soils mechanics and related engineering applications.
A collection of more than one hundred papers is included in these volumes, addressing the three thematic areas experimental, including advances in testing techniques and soil behaviour, modelling, covering theoretical and constitutive issues together with numerical and physical modelling, and engineering, focusing on approaches, case histories and geo-environmental themes. The areas of application of the papers embrace most of the geotechnical problems related to unsaturated soils. Increasing interest in geo-environmental problems, including chemical coupling, marks new perspectives in unsaturated soil mechanics. We hope this book will provide a valuable up-to-date reference across the subject for both researchers and practitioners.
The published contributions, coming from fourteen European countries and another fourteen countries all around the world, were selected after a careful peer-review process. We would like to acknowledge the work done by the reviewers, for their fundamental contribution in assuring the quality of the published papers. We also gratefully acknowledge our colleagues from the Organising and the Technical Advisory Committees and the Authors for the valuable help they provided towards the outcome of the Conference. Special thanks are due to Dr. Marco Caruso, who took charge of the final layout of the publication.
The Conference has been endorsed by the Università di Napoli Federico II, and by the Politecnico di Milano. We thank the Italian Geotechnical Society – AGI –for supporting the initiative in the National and the International community.
It is, with a sort of romantic attitude, that we acknowledge valued contributions from all the continents, which reminds us of the role played by Napoli in joining cultures and peoples during its long lasting history of more than twenty-eight centuries
Calibration of soil constitutive laws by inverse analysis
No full textWhen a model is calibrated by iteratively changing the estimates of the model input parameters until the value of an objective function, which quantifies the match between observed and computed results, is minimized we are dealing with inverse analysis. The major advantage of an inverse modelling is the automatic and objective calculation of the parameter values that produce the best fit between measured data (often called observations) and computed results. The main difficulties are related to the complexity of most numerical models, which sometimes cause problems of non-uniqueness and instability of the solution or insensitivity of the results to changes in the values of the parameters. This chapter presents the main aspects related to inverse analysis techniques used to calibrate the parameters of soil constitutive laws. It comprises three main sections respectively dealing with: a computer code designed to allow inverse modeling posed as a parameter estimation problem; the use of inverse analysis to calibrate soil models from results of laboratory experiments; an inverse analysis procedure to update the design predictions of a supported excavation system using monitoring data collected during construction
Internal Erosion in Earthdams, Dikes and Levees
Full text linkThe volume contains the contributions to the 26th Annual Meeting of the European Working Group on Internal Erosion in Embankment Dams, Levees and Dikes, and their Foundations (EWG-IE), held at Politecnico di Milano, in Milano, Italy, from September 10 to 13, 2018.
The European Working Group was set up in 1993 to focus on the vulnerability of dams to internal erosion. After an inaugural workshop on definitions and needs, the Group has regularly organized Annual Meetings to share knowledge and address emerging issues on soil internal erosion in water retaining structures. Over the years, the Meetings have seen the participation of university researchers, scientists and engineers from agencies, industries, and public bodies, from Europe and overseas.
Following the last successful event in Delft in September 2017, the objective of the meeting in Milano was to serve as a fertile discussion platform, strengthening sound knowledge as well as introducing novel ideas, in the thematic areas in line
with the traditional aims of EWG-IE.
More than 100 authors, coming from academic institutions, private and public bodies, in European and overseas countries, contributed to the peer-reviewed papers included in the volume. These are grouped into four sections, namely
• Laboratory techniques and findings;
• From modeling to design criteria;
• Prevention measures and field assessment;
• Open issues for discussion and contribution.
We gratefully acknowledge the careful reviewing work by the members of the Scientific Committee, the technical and administrative support by Federica Aggio and Silvia Spada of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the skills, patience and care of Marco Caruso who took charge of the editing process, and the support of Politecnico di Milano in providing the facilities for the organization of the meeting.
Finally, we are very glad to have hosted the contributors in Milano, a city that was able to evolve and expand its horizons, from the Celtic origin to the twenty-first century, to become a center where dynamism and creativity still coexist with the quietness of old hidden corners.
Cristina Jommi, Donatella Sterpi
Chairpersons of 26th Annual Meetin
Applicability of the fracture flow interface to the analysis of piping in granular material (abstract)
No full textGeoscience & EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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