The three major distress conditions affecting the performance of asphalt pavements are permanent deformation or rutting, fatigue or load associated cracking, and low temperature or thermal cracking. In an earlier technical topics article (Fall, 1998), we examined the causes of fatigue cracking and the importance of good compaction during construction to help minimize this type of distress. In t...

Database indices provide a non-discriminative navigational infrastructure to localize tuples of interest. Their maintenance cost is taken during database updates. In this work we study the complementary approach, addressing index maintenance as part of query processing using continuous physical reorganization, i.e., cracking the database into manageable pieces. Each query is interpreted not onl...

Cracking furnace system is the starting and the most critical sector of an ethylene plant where heavier components are cracked into lighter products, such as ethylene, propylene, and etc. During the production, coking can adversely affect the manufacturing performance, such that furnaces have to be decoked for some controlled time. The cracking and decoking processes both influence the plant pr...

Article history: Received: 08.10.2013. Received in revised form: 21.11.2013. Accepted: 25.11.2013. This study presents a cellular automata (CA) method to map the cracking patterns of laterally loaded masonry wall panels with openings. Firstly, the central point displacement of each CA cell is calculated from the finite element method (FEM). Then, the displacements are normalized to form the CA ...

Abstract:This paper addresses the short-term scheduling problem for the ethylene cracking process with feedstocks and energy constraints. The cracking production of ethylene is a process with units that have decaying performance, requiring periodic cleanup to restore their performance. Under the condition of limited feedstocks, the production operating mode of the cracking furnaces is to keep y...

At the age of 3.5 years, wild chimpanzees at Bossou, Guinea, begin to use hammer and anvil stones to crack oil-palm nuts to get the kernels. To clarify the developmental processes, the authors did a field experiment in which stones and oil-palm nuts were provided. Infant chimpanzees' stone-nut manipulation was observed and video recorded. Data were collected from 3 infants younger than 4 years ...

Ethylene cracking furnace system is the heart of ethylene production. It can process different raw materials in the pipe group of each furnace and can produce the main chemical products like ethylene, propylene and ethane. In the real world ethylene plant, there are two operation modes in the furnace system, one has a backup furnace in the system and the other is with all the furnaces available...

Ke Long I-Chun Cheng Alexis Kattamis Helena Gleskova Sigurd Wagner James C. Sturm Abstract — A process temperature of ~300°C produces amorphous-silicon (a-Si) thin-film transistors (TFTs) with the best performance and long-term stability. Clear organic polymers (plastics) are the most versatile substrate materials for flexible displays. However, clear plastics with a glass-transition temperatur...