5,113 research outputs found

    Dynamic nonlinear analyses for the 4-storey infilled R/C frame: study of a retrofitting solution

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    A research project on assessment and retrofitting of R/C frame structures is currently being developed under the research programme of the ICONS TMR-research network. This paper presents and discusses the preliminary experimental results from a 4-storey bare frame representative of the common practice of 40~50 years ago in most south European countries and devotes special attention to the study of a retrofitting solution based on bracing and rubber dissipaters, which intends to increase stiffness and damping reducing consequently the earthquake deformation demands.O estudo aqui apresentado concentra-se numa solução de reforço de um pórtico utilizando contraventamentos (k-bracing) com perfis de aço em conjunto com elementos elastoméricos de dissipação. Os resultados das análises não lineares da estrutura com e sem alvenaria e com reforço são apresentados e discutidos. Na segunda parte da comunicação apresentam-se os resultados experimentais já disponíveis e discute-se o problema da modelação recorrendo aos resultados experimentais e comparando os resultados obtidos com diferentes tipos de modelos

    Seismic analyses of a R/C building: study of a retrofitting solution

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    The preliminary experimental results from the tests on a 4-storey R/C frame structure are presented and discussed. The full-scale model is representative of the common practice of 40~50 years ago in most south European countries. Special attention is devoted to the study of a retrofitting solution based on bracing and rubber dissipaters, which intends to increase stiffness and damping reducing consequently the earthquake deformation demands

    At limits of life: multidisciplinary insights reveal environmental constraints on biotic diversity in continental Antarctica

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    Data source: Supporting information, http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0044578#s5Multitrophic communities that maintain the functionality of the extreme Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems, while the simplest of any natural community, are still challenging our knowledge about the limits to life on earth. In this study, we describe and interpret the linkage between the diversity of different trophic level communities to the geological morphology and soil geochemistry in the remote Transantarctic Mountains (Darwin Mountains, 80uS). We examined the distribution and diversity of biota (bacteria, cyanobacteria, lichens, algae, invertebrates) with respect to elevation, age of glacial drift sheets, and soil physicochemistry. Results showed an abiotic spatial gradient with respect to the diversity of the organisms across different trophic levels. More complex communities, in terms of trophic level diversity, were related to the weakly developed younger drifts (Hatherton and Britannia) with higher soil C/N ratio and lower total soluble salts content (thus lower conductivity). Our results indicate that an increase of ion concentration from younger to older drift regions drives a succession of complex to more simple communities, in terms of number of trophic levels and diversity within each group of organisms analysed. This study revealed that integrating diversity across multi-trophic levels of biotic communities with abiotic spatial heterogeneity and geological history is fundamental to understand environmental constraints influencing biological distribution in Antarctic soil ecosystems.Catarina Magalhães, Mark I. Stevens, S. Craig Cary, Becky A. Ball, Bryan C. Storey, Diana H. Wall, Roman Tűrk and Ulrike Ruprech

    Supplemental Material - Reflections on Applying Institutional Ethnography in Participatory Weight Stigma Research with Young Women

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    Supplemental Material for Reflections on Applying Institutional Ethnography in Participatory Weight Stigma Research with Young Women by Alexa R. Ferdinands, Tara-Leigh F. McHugh, Kate Storey and Kim D. Raine in International Journal of Qualitative Methods</p

    Post-war British working-class fiction with special reference to the novels of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, David Storey and Barry Hines

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    This study is about British working-class fiction in the post-war period. It covers various authors such as Robert Tressell, George Orwell, Walter Greenwood, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and DH Lawrence from the early twentieth century; writers traditionally classified as 'Angry Young Men' like John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, John Wain and Kingsley Amis; and working-class novelists like John Braine, Stan Barstow, David Storey, Alan Sillitoe and Barry Hines from the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the main issues dealt with in the course of this study are language, form, community, self/identity/autobiography, sexuality and relationship with bourgeois art. The major argument centres on two questions: representation of working-class life, and the relationship between working-class literary tradition and dominant ideologies. We will be arguing that while working-class fiction succeeded in challenging and rupturing bourgeois literary tradition, on the level of language and linguistic medium of expression for example, it utterly failed to break away from dominant, bourgeois modes of literary production in relation to form, for instance. Our argument is situated within Marxist approaches to literature, a political and aesthetic position from which we attempt an analysis and an evaluation of this working-class literary tradition. These critical approaches provide us also with the theoretical tool to define the political perspective of this tradition, and to judge whether it was confined to a descriptive mode of representation or located in a radical, political outlook

    Entrepreneurial growth in British regions 1980-1998

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    This paper examines the relationship between new firm startups and employment growth in Great Britain. We construct a new data set for 60 British regions, covering the whole of Great Britain, between 1980 and 1998. The central theme of the paper is that, with the exception of a recent paper by Audretsch and Fritsch (2002) for Germany, no data set has been available to examine long-run, as well as short-run relationships. The current paper uses a long-run data set and obtains results for Great Britain which are in some respects similar to those for Germany. There are a number of theoretical reasons to expect a positive relationship between the extent to which a geographical area is 'entrepreneurial' and the extent to which it is 'economically successful' (measured as, for instance, the number of jobs created). The first is that if 'entrepreneurial' is reflected in 'new firm formation' then these new firms create jobs directly and so add to the stock of jobs. The second is that the new firms constitute a (real or imagined) competitive threat to existing firms, encouraging the latter to perform better. Finally, new firms provide a vehicle for the introduction of new ideas and innovation to an economy, which has been shown to be a key source of long-term economic growth [Romer 1986]. However, there are also reasons for not expecting firm formation rates to be related to job creation. We mention two of them. The first is that new firms directly contribute only a small proportion of the stock of jobs in the economy [Storey 1994]. Secondly, most new firms are merely displacing existing firms without any observable gain either to the customer or to the economy [Storey and Strange 1991]. To establish the relation empirically, we estimate a model where employment growth is explained by startup activity and some controls, using our long-run data set. Within the period 1980-1998 we analyze different subperiods to examine whether the impact of new firm startups on growth has changed during the last two decades of the 20th century. We explicitly take account of numerous empirical pitfalls. We find evidence for positive employment effects of startup activity for British regions. Two important conclusions can be drawn from our regression exercises. First, the positive impact of new firm startups on employment growth is stronger for the 1990s than for the 1980s. This finding is consistent with Audretsch and Fritsch (2002), who find an increased impact of new firm startups on employment growth for German regions over the last two decades of the 20th century. Second, lag structures are important, and longer lagged startups are found to have a bigger impact on employment growth than shorter lagged startups. This finding is consistent with Audretsch, Carree and Thurik (2001). They investigate the relation between entrepreneurship and unemployment for 23 OECD countries and find empirical evidence for their claim that "the employment impact of entrepreneurship is not instantaneous but rather requires a number of years for the firm to grow". Selected references: Audretsch, D.B., M.A. Carree and A.R. Thurik (2001), "Does entrepreneurship reduce unemployment?", Discussion paper TI01-074/3, Tinbergen Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Audretsch, D.B., and M. Fritsch (2002), "Growth regimes over Time and Space", Regional Studies (forth-coming). Romer, P.M. (1986), "Increasing returns and Long Run Growth", Journal of Political Economy 94, 1002-1037. Storey, D.J. and A. Strange, (1992), "Entrepreneurship in Cleveland 1979-1989: A Study of the Effects of the Enterprise Culture", Employment Department, Research Series No. 3. Storey, D.J. (1994), "Understanding the Small Business Sector", Routledge, London.

    Effect of Infill Walls and Plaster for a Four Storey R/C Building

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    6th International Operational Modal Analysis Conference (IOMAC) -- MAY 12-14, 2015 -- Gijon, SPAINWOS: 000365243600004Infill walls are non-structural elements, which are mainly used for architectural purposes. Besides contribution of infill walls is ignored during the structural analysis, the effect of the infill walls are usually taken into account through the application of additional loads and masses appropriately distributed along the interfaces between the surrounding frame and the infill walls. In doing so, the stiffness and strength contribution of the latter elements as well as their interaction with the members of the Reinforced Concrete (RC) frame are also ignored. Practically some of the earthquake design codes like Turkish code neglect the effects of the non-structural infill walls. However the presence of infill walls significantly increases the stiffness and the strength of a frame. The reasons of this increment are high in-plane stiffness of infill and the composite action of the infill and the frame. On the other hand, plastering significantly affects the behaviour of infill walls. Thus, the dynamic characteristics of a building also affected by the mu 11 walls of building having plaster or not. The objective of this study is selected to compare the behaviour of mull walls with and without plaster by focusing on dynamic characteristics of a 4-storey residential R/C building in Eskisehir, Turkey. Natural periods, mode shapes and damping ratios of the building were determined for two different construction stages by using ambient vibration test. To obtain experimental dynamic characteristics, Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition (EFDD) technique was used. These 4-storey residential R/C building is located in Eskisehir, Turkey. The investigated building in which seismic loads are jointly resisted by frames and structural walls. There are only one shear wall along x-direction and four shear walls along y-direction. The floor area of the building is 400 m(2) and story heights are 2.83 m. Total area of infill walls for one storey are 5.44 m(2) and 10.75 m(2) at x-direction y-direction, respectively. As a result of this study, vibration measurements are established that, plaster significantly changed the dynamic characteristics of building. Decrease in the periods both x and y directions and also torsional period showed that the plaster increases the lateral stiffness of the infill walls and thereby it increased the lateral stiffness of the building.Bruel & Kjaer, Structural Vibrat Solut, InstrutechSOLUT, Univ Aquila, gijon Convent Bur, Univ British Columbi

    Atomic data from the IRON project - LI. Electron impact excitation of FeIX

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    We calculate collision strengths and thermally averaged collision strengths for electron excitation between the one hundred and forty energetically lowest levels of Fe8+. The scattering target is more elaborate than in any earlier work and large increases are found in the excitation rates among the levels of the 3s(2)3p(5)3d electron configuration due to resonance series that have not been considered previously. The implications for solar and stellar spectroscopy have been discussed elsewhere (Storey & Zeippen 2001). We correct some errors that were made in generating the figures given in that paper and present corrected versions

    3-D nonlinear dynamic progressive collapse analysis of multi-storey steel composite frame buildings—Parametric study

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    A 3-dimensional finite element model built by the author was used in this paper to analyze the progressive collapse of a multi-storey steel composite frame building. The proposed model can represent the global 3-D behavior of the multi-storey building under the sudden column removal scenarios. Based on this model, parametric studies were carried out to investigate the structural behavior with variations in: strength of structural steel, strength of concrete and reinforcement mesh size. Through the parametric study, the measures to mitigate progressive collapse in the future design were recommended
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