pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Construction Problems on the Karstified Limestone Tuffs of Condeixa, Central Portugal: A Case Study

Abstract  During the excavations for the foundations of a three storey building on the limestone tuffs of Condeixa, Central Portugal, a large dissolution fissure and smaller dissolution voids were found. Since the area has never been the subject of engineering geology investigation, it was decided to evaluate the risk associated with the construction of the building. These limestone tuffs were formed in a continental environment by the precipitation of calcite carried by the water coming from the large limestone body in the east. The precipitated calcite mixed with the terrigenous materials and around trunks and leaves of plants, originating a very heterogeneous and porous ground, which is characteristic of limestone tuffs. The study started with a detailed geological survey followed by a large number of destructive drillings, located essentially under the pad foundations. The results revealed several karstic cavities with serious problems for the building foundations and the structure, and many smaller dissolution cavities, often filled with clayey soils. The ground treatment solutions used included, dental cleaning, filling with concrete or granular material the dissolution structures accessible at the level of the foundation, reinforcement of the footing and the structure of the building and adding a continuous foundation beam to hold the foundations together. The cost of the engineering geology study, site investigation, ground treatment, and the reinforcement of the foundation and building, increased the total construction cost from 2%, at the design stage, to 4.8%.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10706-004-2104-
Cardosins improve neuronal regeneration after cell disruption: a comparative expression study

Abstract  The establishment of primary cell cultures is invaluable for studying cell and molecular biological questions. Although primary cell cultures more closely resemble and function like in the native environment, during the culture establishment the cells undergo several changes including the damage sustained during their removal from original tissue. The resultant cells have to rebalance the expression of their processing molecules to ascertain matrix signalling that ensure cell adaptation and consequent proliferation. Hence, we used cardosin, a novel plant enzyme for tissue disaggregation, for isolating and culturing neuronal cells from embryonic rats. The present investigation reports the molecular events, mainly related with matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs)/tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase (TIMPs) expression, which could substantiate the superior neurite outgrowth and dendritic extension previously described. It was observed that 24 h after primary culture establishment, MMP-2 and MMP-9 messenger RNA (mRNA) are significantly upregulated, while the expression of TIMP-1 and TIMP-2 is unaltered. Regarding the role of laminin in neuronal pathfinding, it was found that the use of anti-laminin antibody and arginine–glycine–aspartate (RGD) peptide exerted inhibitory effects on neurite outgrowth after mechanical lesion where the expression of MMP-9 and TIMP-1 is upregulated under non-permissive conditions in response to mechanical injury.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10565-008-9058-
Clustering effects in fusion evaporation reactions with light even-even N=Z nuclei. The 24 Mg and 28 Si cases

International audienceIn the recent years, cluster structures have been evidenced in many ground and excited states of light nuclei [1, 2]. The decay of highly excited states of 24 Mg is studied in fusion evaporation events completely detected in charge in the reactions 12 C+ 12 C and 14 N+ 10 B at 95 and 80 MeV incident energy, respectively, and compared to the results of a pure statistical model [3, 4]. Inclusive variables are in general well reproduced by the model. We found clear deviations from the statistical model if we select emission channels involving multiple α particles which are more probable than expected from a purely statistical behavior. Data from 12 C+ 12 C reaction have been analyzed in order to study the decay of the Hoyle state of 12 C* with two different selections: peripheral binary collisions and 6α decay channel in central events. To continue the investigation on light systems, we have recently measured the 16 O+ 12 C reaction at three different beam energies, namely E beam = 90, 110 and 130 MeV. Preliminary results are presented
The effect of personality on collaborative task performance and interaction

Collocated, multi-user technologies, which support group-work are becoming increasingly popular. Examples include MERL's Diamondtouch and Microsoft's Surface, both of which have evolved from research prototypes to commercial products. Many applications have been developed for such technologies which support the work and entertainment needs of small groups of people. None of these applications however, have been studied in terms of the interactions and performances of their users with regards to their personality. In this paper, we address this research gap by conducting a series of user studies involving dyads working on a number of multi-user applications on the DiamondTouch tabletop device
Coupled Amplitude-Streaming Flow Equations for Nearly Inviscid Faraday Waves in Small Aspect Ratio Containers

We derive a set of asymptotically exact coupled amplitude-streaming flow ({CASF}) equations governing the evolution of weakly nonlinear nearly inviscid multimode Faraday waves and the associated streaming flow in finite geometries. The streaming flow is found to play a particularly important role near mode interactions. Such interactions come about either through a suitable choice of parameters or through breaking of degeneracy among modes related by symmetry. An example of the first case is provided by the interaction of two nonaxisymmetric modes in a circular container with different azimuthal wavenumbers. The second case arises when the shape of the container is changed from square to slightly rectangular, or from circular to slightly noncircular but with a plane of symmetry. The generation of streaming flow in each of these cases is discussed in detail and the properties of the resulting CASF equations are described. A preliminary analysis suggests that these equations can resolve discrepancies between existing theory and experimental results in the first two of the above cases
Highly conductive coatings of carbon black/silica composites obtained by a sol-gel process

Conductive submicronic coatings of carbon black (CB)/silica composites have been prepared by a sol-gel process and deposited by spray-coating on glazed porcelain tiles. Stable CB dispersions with surfactant were rheologically characterized to determine the optimum CB-surfactant ratio. The composites were analyzed by Differential Thermal and Thermogravimetric Analysis and Hg-Porosimetry. Thin coatings were thermally treated in the temperature range of 300-500degC in air atmosphere. The microstructure of the coatings was determined by scanning electron microscopy and the structure evaluated by confocal Raman spectroscopy. The electrical characterization of the samples was carried out using dc intensity-voltage curves. The coatings exhibit good adhesion, high density and homogeneous distribution of the conductive filler (CB) in the insulate matrix (silica) that protects against the thermal degradation of the CB nanoparticles during the sintering process. As consequence, the composite coatings show the lowest resistivity values for CB-based films reported in the literature, with values of ~7times10 -5Omegam
The impact of sustainable construction and knowledge management on sustainability goals. A review of the venezuelan renewable energy sector

The recognition of the relevance of energy, especially of the renewable energies generated by the sun, water, wind, tides, modern biomass or thermal is growing significantly in the global society based on the possibility it has to improve societies′ quality of life, to support poverty reduction and sustainable development. Renewable energy, and mainly the energy generated by large hydropower generation projects that supply most of the renewable energy consumed by developing countries, requires many technical, legal, financial and social complex processes sustained by innovations and valuable knowledge. Besides these efforts, renewable energy requires a solid infrastructure to generate and distribute the energy resources needed to solve the basic needs of society. This demands a proper construction performance to deliver the energy projects planned according to specifications and respecting environmental and social concerns, which implies the observance of sustainable construction guidelines. But construction projects are complex and demanding and frequently face time and cost overruns that may cause negative impacts on the initial planning and thus on society. The renewable energy issue and the large renewable energy power generation and distribution projects are particularly significant for developing countries and for Latin America in particular, as this region concentrates an important hydropower potential and installed capacity. Using as references the performance of Venezuelan large hydropower generation projects and the Guri dam construction, this research evaluates the tight relationship existing between sustainable construction and knowledge management and their impact to achieve sustainability goals. The knowledge management processes are proposed as a basic strategy to allow learning from successes and failures obtained in previous projects and transform the enhancement opportunites into actions to improve the performance of the renewable energy power generation and distribution projects
A sharing-based approach to supporting adaptation\ud
in service compositions

Data-related properties of the activities involved in a service composition can be used to facilitate several design-time and run-time adaptation tasks, such as service evolution, distributed enactment, and instance-level adaptation. A number of these properties can be expressed using a notion of sharing. We present an approach for automated inference of data properties based on sharing analysis, which is able to handle service compositions with complex control structures, involving loops and sub-workflows. The properties inferred can include data dependencies, information content, domain-defined attributes, privacy or confidentiality levels, among others. The analysis produces characterizations of the data and the activities in the composition in terms of minimal and maximal sharing, which can then be used to verify compliance of potential adaptation actions, or as supporting information in their generation. This sharing analysis approach can be used both at design time and at run time. In the latter case, the results of analysis can be refined using the composition traces (execution logs) at the point of execution, in order to support run-time adaptation
Dust tracking techniques applied to the STARDUST facility: First results

An important issue related to future nuclear fusion reactors fueled with deuterium and tritium is the creation of large amounts of dust due to several mechanisms (disruptions, ELMs and VDEs). The dust size expected in nuclear fusion experiments (such as ITER) is in the order of microns (between 0.1 and 1000 μm). Almost the total amount of this dust remains in the vacuum vessel (VV). This radiological dust can re-suspend in case of LOVA (loss of vacuum accident) and these phenomena can cause explosions and serious damages to the health of the operators and to the integrity of the device. The authors have developed a facility, STARDUST, in order to reproduce the thermo fluid-dynamic conditions comparable to those expected inside the VV of the next generation of experiments such as ITER in case of LOVA. The dust used inside the STARDUST facility presents particle sizes and physical characteristics comparable with those that created inside the VV of nuclear fusion experiments. In this facility an experimental campaign has been conducted with the purpose of tracking the dust re-suspended at low pressurization rates (comparable to those expected in case of LOVA in ITER and suggested by the General Safety and Security Report ITER-GSSR) using a fast camera with a frame rate from 1000 to 10,000 images per second. The velocity fields of the mobilized dust are derived from the imaging of a two-dimensional slice of the flow illuminated by optically adapted laser beam. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the possibility of dust tracking by means of image processing with the objective of determining the velocity field values of dust re-suspended during a LOVA
Self-adaptive hp finite element method with iterative mesh truncation technique accelerated with Adaptive Cross Approximation

ABSTRACT\ud
\ud
To alleviate the computational bottleneck of a powerful two-dimensional self-adaptive hp finite element method (FEM) for the analysis of open region problems, which uses an iterative computation of the Integral Equation over a fictitious boundary for truncating the FEM domain, we propose the use of Adaptive Cross Approximation (ACA) to effectively accelerate the computation of the Integral Equation. It will be shown that in this context ACA exhibits a robust behavior, yields good accuracy and compression levels up to 90%, and provides a good fair control of the approximants, which is a crucial advantage for hp adaptivity. Theoretical and empirical results of performance (computational complexity) comparing the accelerated and non-accelerated versions of the method are presented.\ud
Several canonical scenarios are addressed to resemble the behavior of ACA with h, p and hp adaptive strategies, and higher order methods in general
Complicity functions for detecting organized crime rings

Graph theory is an evident paradigm for analyzing social networks, which are the main tool for collective behavior research, addressing the interrelations between members of a more or less well-defined community. Particularly, social network analysis has important implications in the fight against organized crime, business associations with fraudulent purposes or terrorism. Classic centrality functions for graphs are able to identify the key players of a network or their intermediaries. However, these functions provide little information in large and heterogeneous graphs. Often the most central elements of the network (usually too many) are not related to a collective of actors of interest, such as be a group of drug traffickers or fraudsters. Instead, its high centrality is due to the good relations of these central elements with other honorable actors. In this paper we introduce complicity functions, which are capable of identifying the intermediaries in a group of actors, avoiding core elements that have nothing to do with this group. These functions can classify a group of criminals according to the strength of their relationships with other actors to facilitate the detection of organized crime rings. The proposed approach is illustrated by a real example provided by the Spanish Tax Agency, including a network of 835 companies, of which eight were fraudulent
Structural reversibility and nickel particle stability in lanthanum iron nickel perovskite-type catalysts

Perovskite-type oxides have shown the ability to reversibly segregate precious metals from their structure. This reversible segregation behavior was explored for a commonly used catalyst metal, Ni, to prevent Ni sintering, which is observed on most catalyst support materials. Temperature-programmed reduction, X-ray diffraction, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, electron microscopy, and catalytic activity tests were used to follow the extent of reversible Ni segregation. LaFe1−xNixO3±δ (0≤x≤0.2) was synthesized using a citrate-based solution process. After reduction at 600 °C, metallic Ni particles were displayed on the perovskite surfaces, which were active towards the hydrogenation of CO2. The overall Ni reducibility was proportional to the Ni content and increased from 35 % for x=0.05 to 50 % for x=0.2. Furthermore, Ni could be reincorporated reversibly into the perovskite lattice during reoxidation at 650 °C. This could be exploited for catalyst regeneration under conditions under which impregnated materials such as Ni/LaFeO3±δ and Ni/Al2O3 suffer from sintering
Improving root cause analysis through the integration of PLM systems with cross supply chain maintenance data

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a system architecture for integrating product lifecycle management (PLM) systems with cross supply chain maintenance information to support root cause analysis. By integrating product data from PLM systems with warranty claims, vehicle diagnostics and technical publications, engineers were able to improve the root cause analysis and close the information gaps. Data collection was achieved via in-depth semi-structured interviews and workshops with experts from the automotive sector. Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagrams were used to design the system architecture proposed. A user scenario is also presented to demonstrate the functionality of the system
Oxidation of DOPAC by nitric oxide: effect of superoxide dismutase

This study aimed to characterize the redox interaction between 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid (DOPAC) and nitric oxide (·NO), and to assess the reductive and oxidative decay pathways of the DOPAC semiquinone originating from this interaction. The reaction between DOPAC and ·NO led to the formation of the DOPAC semiquinone radical, detected by electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and stabilized by Mg2+, and the nitrosyl anion detected as nitrosylmyoglobin. The EPR signal corresponding to the DOPAC semiquinone was modulated as follows: (i) it was suppressed by glutathione and ascorbic acid with the formation of new EPR spectra corresponding to the glutathionyl and ascorbyl radical, respectively; (ii) it was enhanced by Cu,Zn-superoxide dismutase; the enzyme also accelerated the decay of the semiquinone species to DOPAC quinone. These results are interpreted as a one-electron oxidation of DOPAC by ·NO; the reductive decay of the semiquinone back to DOPAC was facilitated by reducing agents, such as glutathione and ascorbate, whereas the oxidative decay to DOPAC quinone was facilitated by superoxide dismutase. The latter effect is understood in terms of a reversible conversion of nitrosyl anion to ·NO by the enzyme. The biological relevance of these reactions is also discussed in terms of the reactivity of peroxynitrite towards DOPAC as a model with implications for aerobic conditions.http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1471-4159.2002.00900.
Adenosine A2A receptor antagonists exert motor and neuroprotective effects by distinct cellular mechanisms

To investigate whether the motor and neuroprotective effects of adenosine A2A receptor (A2AR) antagonists are mediated by distinct cell types in the 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) model of Parkinson's disease.We used the forebrain A2AR knock-out mice coupled with flow cytometric analyses and intracerebroventricular injection to determine the contribution of A2ARs in forebrain neurons and glial cells to A2AR antagonist-mediated motor and neuroprotective effects.The selective deletion of A2ARs in forebrain neurons abolished the motor stimulant effects of the A2AR antagonist KW-6002 but did not affect acute MPTP neurotoxicity. Intracerebroventricular administration of KW-6002 into forebrain A2AR knock-out mice reinstated protection against acute MPTP-induced dopaminergic neurotoxicity and attenuated MPTP-induced striatal microglial and astroglial activation.A2AR activity in forebrain neurons is critical to the control of motor activity, whereas brain cells other than forebrain neurons (likely glial cells) are important components for protection against acute MPTP toxicity. Ann Neurol 2008http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ana.2131
Modelling of chloride penetration into non-saturated concrete: Case study application for real marine off shore structures

The aim of this paper is to explain the chloride concentration profiles obtained experimentally from control\ud
samples of an offshore platform after 25 years of service life. The platform is located 12 km off the\ud
coast of the Brazilian province Rio Grande do Norte, in the north-east of Brazil. The samples were\ud
extracted at different orientations and heights above mean sea level. A simple model based on Fick’s second\ud
law is considered and compared with a finite element model which takes into account transport of\ud
chloride ions by diffusion and convection. Results show that convective flows significantly affect the\ud
studied chloride penetrations. The convection velocity is obtained by fitting the finite element solution\ud
to the experimental data and seems to be directly proportional to the height above mean sea level and\ud
also seems to depend on the orientation of the face of the platform. This work shows that considering\ud
solely diffusion as transport mechanism does not allow a good prediction of the chloride profiles.\ud
Accounting for capillary suction due to moisture gradients permits a better interpretation of the material’s\ud
behaviour
Topological phases in small quantum Hall samples

Topological order has proven a useful concept to describe quantum phase
transitions which are not captured by the Ginzburg-Landau type of
symmetry-breaking order. However, lacking a local order parameter, topological
order is hard to detect. One way to detect is via direct observation of anyonic
properties of excitations which are usually discussed in the thermodynamic
limit, but so far has not been realized in macroscopic quantum Hall samples.
Here we consider a system of few interacting bosons subjected to the lowest
Landau level by a gauge potential, and theoretically investigate vortex
excitations in order to identify topological properties of different ground
states. Our investigation demonstrates that even in surprisingly small systems
anyonic properties are able to characterize the topological order. In addition,
focusing on a system in the Laughlin state, we study the robustness of its
anyonic behavior in the presence of tunable finite-range interactions acting as
a perturbation. A clear signal of a transition to a different state is
reflected by the system's anyonic properties
Macroscopic simulation of the liner honing process

The form quality, the roughness and the surface appearance produced by honing minimizes the friction of the piston in the liner. The process is however mechanically complex and the selection of the process parameters is currently based on empirical methods. The aim of this paper is thus to develop a macroscopic simulation environment of complete real honing cycles, which will help end-users during the setting-up. This virtual tool is based on a space-time discretization and a macroscopic cutting model taking into account local contacts between the workpiece and the abrasive tool. The space-time discretization allows representing the machine environment with the tool, the workpiece and the kinematics. Simulation results are finally validated by comparison with industrial experiments.Thèse CIFRe Renault SAS / MSMP

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