Mosquito (Aedes togoi) larva has to float its siphon on the water surface to breathe air. To elucidate the floating mechanism of the siphon, morphological structures, especially the flap-like lobes and spiracle of the siphon, were observed. Wettability and dynamic behavior of the lobes on the water surface were also experimentally examined. The lobes formed a hollow cone shape under water and e...

Pit latrines can provide improved household sanitation, but without effective and inexpensive emptying options, they are often abandoned once full and may pose a public health threat. Emptying techniques can be difficult, as the sludge contents of each pit latrine are different. The design of effective emptying techniques (e.g., pumps) is limited by a lack of data characterizing typical in situ...

Random field modelling of soil variability allows significant statistical results to be inferred from field data; moreover, it provides a consistent framework for incorporating such variability in reliability-based design. Cone penetration testing (CPT) is increasingly appreciated because of its near-continuity and repeatability. Stressnormalised CPT parameters are included in widely used engin...

Shear wave velocity is a basic engineering tool required to define dynamic properties of soils. In many instances it may be preferable to determine Vs indirectly by common in-situ tests, such as the Standard Penetration Test. Many empirical correlations based on the Standard Penetration Test are broadly classified as regression techniques. However, no rigorous procedure has been published for c...

Cone penetration test is one of the most common in-situ tests for pile analysis given that by its analogy as a model pile, the measured cone resistance and sleeve friction can be employed for estimation of pile unit toe and shaft resistances, respectively. In this paper, group method of data handling (GMDH)-type neural networks optimized using Genetic algorithms (GAs) are used for modelling the...