The paper presents a proposal for the assessment of the reliability of steel truss (both statically determinate and indeterminate) in the persistent and accidental design situation. In the analysis, a probabilistic approach was used. The global Hasofer-Lind reliability index was employed, computed in successive time steps for the whole structure, not for individual elements. The statically determinate truss was modelled as a serial system from the reliability standpoint. For the statically indeterminate truss, kinematically admissible failure mechanisms were determined by means of the examination of the singularity of the stiffness matrix of the structure, converting the truss into a geometrically variable system. For the problem thus formulated, a serial-parallel reliability model was constructed. Monitoring the reliability index in the successive minutes of the fire makes it possible to estimate the probability of the structure failure, and to decide whether the required safety level is maintained.
A “rock bridge”, defined as the closest distance between two joints in a rock mass, is an important feature affecting the jointed rock mass strength. Artificial jointed rock specimens with two parallel joint fractures were tested under uniaxial compression and numerical simulations were carried out to study the effects of the inclination of the rock bridge, the dip angle of the joint, rock bridge length, and the length of joints on the strength of the jointed rock mass. Research results show: (1) When the length of the joint fracture, the length of the rock bridge, and the inclination of the rock bridge stay unchanged, the uniaxial compressive strength of the specimen gradually increases as the inclination of the joint fracture increases from 0° to 90°. (2) When the length of the joint fracture, the length of the rock bridge, and the inclination of the joint fracture stay unchanged, the uniaxial compressive strength of the specimen shows variations in trends with the inclination of the rock bridge increasing from 30° to 150° (3). In the case when the joint is angled from the vertical loading direction, when the dip angle of the joint fracture, the inclination of the rock bridge, and the length of the rock bridge stay unchanged, the uniaxial compressive strength of the specimen gradually decreases with an increasing length of joint fracture. When the dip angle of the joint fracture, the inclination of the rock bridge, and the length of the joint fracture stay unchanged, the uniaxial compressive strength of the specimen does not show a clear trend with an increase of the length of the rock bridge.
In this paper, a parallel multi-path variant of the well-known TSAB algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem is proposed. Coarse-grained parallelization method is employed, which allows for great scalability of the algorithm with accordance to Gustafon’s law. The resulting P-TSAB algorithm is tested using 162 well-known literature benchmarks. Results indicate that P-TSAB algorithm with a running time of one minute on a modern PC provides solutions comparable to the ones provided by the newest literature approaches to the job shop scheduling problem. Moreover, on average P-TSAB achieves two times smaller percentage relative deviation from the best known solutions than the standard variant of TSAB. The use of parallelization also relieves the user from having to fine-tune the algorithm. The P-TSAB algorithm can thus be used as module in real-life production planning systems or as a local search procedure in other algorithms. It can also provide the upper bound of minimal cycle time for certain problems of cyclic scheduling.
The computing performance optimization of the Short-Lag Spatial Coherence (SLSC) method applied to ultrasound data processing is presented. The method is based on the theory that signals from adjacent receivers are correlated, drawing on a simplified conclusion of the van Cittert-Zernike theorem. It has been proven that it can be successfully used in ultrasound data reconstruction with despeckling. Former works have shown that the SLSC method in its original form has two main drawbacks: time-consuming processing and low contrast in the area near the transceivers. In this study, we introduce a method that allows to overcome both of these drawbacks.
The presented approach removes the dependency on distance (the “lag” parameter value) between signals used to calculate correlations. The approach has been tested by comparing results obtained with the original SLSC algorithm on data acquired from tissue phantoms.
The modified method proposed here leads to constant complexity, thus execution time is independent of the lag parameter value, instead of the linear complexity. The presented approach increases computation speed over 10 times in comparison to the base SLSC algorithm for a typical lag parameter value. The approach also improves the output image quality in shallow areas and does not decrease quality in deeper areas.
Structures and characteristics ofwideband small-size phase shiftersmade with the use of single parallel stubs are presented in this paper. The stubs can be short-circuited or open-circuited on termination. Such devices arewell known, but are primarily used as components of filters ormatching circuits. The novelty, then, comes from the establishment of simple, but helpful formulae, which enable to describe the insertion phase shift and differential phase shift of a line with short and open stubs connected in parallel. These equations can be very useful for designing complex microwave multi-ports. The results of simulations and measurements of the devices, which were designed and made, are shown herein. It was also proved that the presented devices have several usable operating frequency sub-bands, and that the differential phase shift values in the higher sub-bands are greater than those in the lower operating frequency ranges. Thanks to this, the described phase shifters can be used in more than one frequency sub-band. It was stated that in the conditions under analysis, larger phase shifts can be achieved using open-circuited stubs rather than short-circuited stubs. However, the phase shifters with shorted parallel stubs can operate in a wider frequency band.
Transverse effective thermal conductivity of the random unidirectional fibre-reinforced composite was studied. The geometry was circular with random patterns formed using random sequential addition method. Composite geometries for different volume fraction and fibre radii were generated and their effective thermal conductivities (ETC) were calculated. Influence of fibre-matrix conductivity ratio on composite ETC was investigated for high and low values. Patterns were described by a set of coordination numbers (CN) and correlations between ETC and CN were constructed. The correlations were compared with available formulae presented in literature. Additionally, symmetry of the conductivity tensor for the studied geometries of fibres was analysed.
We report on the first application of the graphics processing units (GPUs) accelerated computing technology to improve performance of numerical methods used for the optical characterization of evaporating microdroplets. Single microdroplets of various liquids with different volatility and molecular weight (glycerine, glycols, water, etc.), as well as mixtures of liquids and diverse suspensions evaporate inside the electrodynamic trap under the chosen temperature and composition of atmosphere. The series of scattering patterns recorded from the evaporating microdroplets are processed by fitting complete Mie theory predictions with gradientless lookup table method. We showed that computations on GPUs can be effectively applied to inverse scattering problems. In particular, our technique accelerated calculations of the Mie scattering theory on a single-core processor in a Matlab environment over 800 times and almost 100 times comparing to the corresponding code in C language. Additionally, we overcame problems of the time-consuming data post-processing when some of the parameters (particularly the refractive index) of an investigated liquid are uncertain. Our program allows us to track the parameters characterizing the evaporating droplet nearly simultaneously with the progress of evaporation.