When a natural gas pipeline ruptures, the adjacent automatic line control valves (ALCVs) should close quickly to prevent leakage or explosion. The differential pressure set point (DPS) at each valve location is the main criteria for value setting in ALCV action. If the DPS is not properly adjusted, the ALCV may mistakenly close or it may not take any action at proper time. This study focused on...

In the recent years, non-connected piled raft foundation has been considered as an economical and practical deep foundation in the situation that high shear and concentrated loads may occur at the connection of the raft and pile head. This paper was presented an experimental study of a square foundation on the effects of parameters such as S/D, L/D and etc. in two cases of connected or non-conn...

In the modelling of timed discrete event systems, one traditionally uses dater functions, which give completion times, as a function of numbers of events. Dater functions are non-decreasing. We extend this modelling to the case of multiform logical and physical times, which are needed to model concurrent behaviors. We represent event sequences and time instants by words. A dater is a map, which...

This paper introduces a simple index that helps to assess the degree of aging or rejuvenation of repairable systems and non-repairable systems (components). The index ranges from –1 to 1. It is negative for the class of decreasing failure rate distributions and point processes with decreasing ROCOF and is positive for the increasing failure rate distributions and point processes with increasing...