Non-local effects have been traditionally identified as one of the most limiting factors of the performance of Brillouin optical time-domain analyzers. These phenomena, directly linked with the energy gained/lost by the pump pulse, limit the probe power and ultimately the SNR of the system. Several solutions have been proposed, although none offers the possibility to increase the probe power un...

For the design of steel and concrete structures, most modern international design codes allow the use of plastic stressstrain-diagrams for the analysis of the bending resistance of the cross-section in the ultimate limit state. Curiously, in Europe and most other parts of the world, timber structures are still designed for the ultimate limit state with the old, conservative concept of full elas...

This paper is concerned with a class of low-rate codes constructed from Hadamard code arrays. A recursive encoding principle is employed to introduce an interleaving gain. Very simple trellis codes with only two or four states are sufficient for this purpose, and the decoding cost involved in the trellis part is typically negligible. Both simulation and analytical results are provided to demons...

An investigation was conducted to determine the influence of recycled scrap tire rubber on the engineering properties of controlled low strength material (CLSM). With control over the ultimate compressive strength of CLSMs being key for applications such as backfilling utility trenches where re-excavation is often necessary, incorporation of scrap tire rubber into the CLSM mixture is a viable w...

A new upper bound on the rate of vertical heat transport is established in 3 dimensions for stress-free velocity boundary conditions on horizontally periodic plates. For large (but finite) Prandtl numbers this bound is an improvement over the ‘ultimate’ Ra scaling and in the limit of infinite Pr, agrees with the bound of Ra recently derived in that limit. keywords: Rayleigh-Bénard convection, B...

The ultimate capacity of support structures is checked with extreme loads. This is straightforward when the limit state equations depend on a single load component, and it has become common to report maxima for each load component. However, if more than one load component is influential, e.g., both axial force and bending moments, it is not straightforward how to define an extreme load. The com...

We examine the ultimate fate of individual opinions in a socially interacting population of leftists, centrists and rightists. In an elemental interaction between agents, a centrist and a leftist can both become centrists or both become leftists with equal rates (and similarly for a centrist and a rightist). However leftists and rightists do not interact. This interaction step between pairs of ...

An investigation was conducted to determine the influence of recycled scrap tire rubber on the engineering properties of controlled low strength material (CLSM). With control over the ultimate compressive strength of CLSMs being key for applications such as backfilling utility trenches where re-excavation is often necessary, incorporation of scrap tire rubber into the CLSM mixture is a viable w...