• Title/Summary/Keyword: City Centre

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Seismic vulnerability assessment of masonry facade walls: development, application and validation of a new scoring method

  • Ferreira, Tiago M.;Vicentea, Romeu;Varum, Humberto
    • Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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    • v.50 no.4
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    • pp.541-561
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    • 2014
  • This paper approaches the issue of seismic vulnerability assessment strategies for facade walls of traditional masonry buildings through the development of a methodology and its subsequent application to over 600 building facades from the old building stock of the historic city centre of Coimbra. Using the post-earthquake damage assessment of masonry buildings in L'Aquila, Italy, an analytical function was developed and calibrated to estimate the mean damage grade for masonry facade walls. Having defined the vulnerability function for facade walls, damage scenarios were calculated and subsequently used in the development of an emergency planning tool and in the elaboration of an access route proposal for the case study of the historic city centre of Coimbra. Finally, the methodology was pre-validated through the comparison of a set of results obtained from its application and also resourcing to a widely accepted mechanical method on the description of the out-of-plane behaviour of facade walls.

Automatic Acquisition of Lexical-Functional Grammar Resources from a Japanese Dependency Corpus

  • Oya, Masanori;Genabith, Josef Van
    • Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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    • 2007.11a
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    • pp.375-384
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    • 2007
  • This paper describes a method for automatic acquisition of wide-coverage treebank-based deep linguistic resources for Japanese, as part of a project on treebank-based induction of multilingual resources in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). We automatically annotate LFG f-structure functional equations (i.e. labelled dependencies) to the Kyoto Text Corpus version 4.0 (KTC4) (Kurohashi and Nagao 1997) and the output of of Kurohashi-Nagao Parser (KNP) (Kurohashi and Nagao 1998), a dependency parser for Japanese. The original KTC4 and KNP provide unlabelled dependencies. Our method also includes zero pronoun identification. The performance of the f-structure annotation algorithm with zero-pronoun identification for KTC4 is evaluated against a manually-corrected Gold Standard of 500 sentences randomly chosen from KTC4 and results in a pred-only dependency f-score of 94.72%. The parsing experiments on KNP output yield a pred-only dependency f-score of 82.08%.

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Deformation-based seismic design of concrete bridges

  • Gkatzogias, Konstantinos I.;Kappos, Andreas J.
    • Earthquakes and Structures
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    • v.9 no.5
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    • pp.1045-1067
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    • 2015
  • A performance-based design (PBD) procedure, initially proposed for the seismic design of buildings, is tailored herein to the structural configurations commonly adopted in bridges. It aims at the efficient design of bridges for multiple performance levels (PLs), achieving control over a broad range of design parameters (i.e., strains, deformations, ductility factors) most of which are directly estimated at the design stage using advanced analysis tools (a special type of inelastic dynamic analysis). To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed design methodology, it is applied to an actual bridge that was previously designed using a different PBD method, namely displacement-based design accounting for higher mode effects, thus enabling comparison of the alternative PBD approaches. Assessment of the proposed method using nonlinear dynamic analysis for a set of spectrum-compatible motions, indicate that it results in satisfactory performance of the bridge. Comparison with the displacement-based method reveals significant cost reduction, albeit at the expense of increased computational effort.

Are Flywheels Right for Rail?

  • Read, M.G.;Smith, R.A.;Pullen, K.R.
    • International Journal of Railway
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    • v.2 no.4
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    • pp.139-146
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    • 2009
  • Vehicle braking in non-electrified rail systems wastes energy. Advanced flywheel technology presents a way to capture and reuse this braking energy to improve vehicle efficiency and so reduce the operating costs and environmental impact of diesel trains. This paper highlights the suitability of flywheels for rail vehicle applications, and proposes a novel mechanical transmission system to apply regenerative braking using a flywheel energy storage device. A computational model is used to illustrate the operation and potential benefits of the energy storage system.

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Seasonal Water Change Assessment at Mahanadi River, India using Multi-temporal Data in Google Earth Engine

  • Jena, Ratiranjan;Pradhan, Biswajeet;Jung, Hyung-Sup;Rai, Abhishek Kumar;Rizeei, Hossein Mojaddadi
    • Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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    • v.36 no.1
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    • pp.1-13
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    • 2020
  • Seasonal changes in river water vary seasonally as well as locationally, and the assessment is essential. In this study, we used the recent technique of post-classification by using the Google earth engine (GEE) to map the seasonal changes in Mahanadi river of Odisha. However,some fixed problems results during the rainy season that affects the livelihood system of Cuttack such as flooding, drowning of children and waste material deposit. Therefore, this study conducted 1) to map and analyse the water density changes and 2) to analyse the seasonal variation of river water to resolve and prevent problem shortcomings. Our results showed that nine types of variation can be found in the Mahanadi River each year. The increase and decrease of intensity of surface water analysed, and it varies in between -130 to 70 ㎥/nf. The highest frequency change is 2900 Hz near Cuttack city. The pi diagram provides the percentage of seasonal variation that can be observed as permanent water (30%), new seasonal (28%), ephemeral (12%), permanent to seasonal (7%) and seasonal (10%). The analysis is helpful and effective to assess the seasonal variation that can provide a platform for the development of Cuttack city that lies in Mahanadi delta.

The Effect of Organisational Structure on Quality Management in Public Hospitals in a Developing Nation: A Comparative Study Between District, State and National Level Hospitals in Malaysia

  • Manaf Noor Hazilah Abd.
    • International Journal of Quality Innovation
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    • v.7 no.1
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    • pp.161-176
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    • 2006
  • The objective of the study was to empirically assess the practice of quality management among employees of Malaysian public hospitals at the district, state and national level hospitals. Comparative analysis on the practice of quality management was made among the three groups of hospitals. Self-administered questionnaire was the main method of data collection. Twenty-three public hospitals throughout Peninsular Malaysia participated in the survey. Practice of quality management was found to be significantly higher in district hospitals than in the national referral centre, which is based in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. However, there was no significant difference in perception of implementation outcome between the three levels of hospitals. Among the factors of quality management, teamwork was found to be significantly higher in district hospitals than in state hospitals and the national referral centre. Leadership and management commitment was found to be significantly higher in district and state hospitals than in the national referral centre. The effect of organizational structure could have an effect on practice of quality management.

A STUDY ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF LAND OWNERSHIP IN THE KYUNGJU-EUPSUNG IN THE PERIOD OF JAPANESE OCCUPANCY (경주읍성지구의 일제시대 토지소유 변화)

  • Han, Sam-Geon
    • Journal of architectural history
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    • v.8 no.1 s.18
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    • pp.29-40
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    • 1999
  • This paper discusses the change of land ownership in the urban historical core of Kyungju city in the Period of Japanese occupancy(1910-45) based on the analysis of land register records. Kyungju city was not designated for the cities controlled by urban planning law which was set up in 1912 and 1934. The major purpose of this paper is to clarify the urbanization process of a Korean local city where the formal urban planning projects were not carried out. The focus of the study is the increase of the Japanese landowners and Japanization of the landscape. In the very beginning of occupation, Japanese already owned about 8% of the total land of the city centre where the old Kyungju castle had been located. The ratio of the land owned by Japanese went up to more or less 70% at the end of World war II. The process which the urban core had been replaced for the Japanese is very clearly traced from the analysis of a land register records.

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The Comparative Analysis of Rn-222 in Water for Public Supply Pump Houses of Ulaanbaatar City

  • Oyunchimeg, Ts.;Khuukhenkhuu, G.;Norov, N,
    • Progress in Medical Physics
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.51-53
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    • 2003
  • The results of the measured specific activities of Rn-222 in water for public water supply pump houses (wells) of Ulaanbaatar City, Mongolia using the HP-Ge gamma-spectrometer, are described. The average of the specific radioactivies for the Rn-222 were for the station “Centre” 82.59 Bq/l, station “Combinat” 91.35 Bq/l and station “Makh” 158.25 Bq/l, respectively.

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Modal analysis and ambient vibration measurements on Mila-Algeria cable stayed bridge

  • Kibboua, Abderrahmane;Farsi, Mohamed Naboussi;Chatelain, Jean-Luc;Guillier, Bertrand;Bechtoula, Hakim;Mehani, Youcef
    • Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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    • v.29 no.2
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    • pp.171-186
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    • 2008
  • The seismic response analysis of an existing bridge needs a mathematical model that can be calibrated with measured dynamic characteristics. These characteristics are the periods and the associated mode shapes of vibration and the modal damping coefficients. This paper deals with the measurements and the interpretation of the results of ambient vibration tests done on a newly erected cable stayed bridge across the Oued Dib River at Mila city in Algeria. The signal analysis of ambient vibration records will permit to determine the dynamic characteristics of the bridge. On the other hand, a 3-D model of the bridge is developed in order to assess the frequencies and the associated modes of vibration. This information will be necessary in the planning of the test on the site (locations of the sensors, frequencies to be measured and the associated mode shapes of vibration). The frequencies predicted by the finite element model are compared with those measured during full-scale ambient vibration measurements of the bridge. In the same way, the modal damping coefficients obtained by the random decrement method are compared to those of similar bridges.