Title of Document: EFFECTS OF WINGWALL CONFIGURATIONS ON THE BEHAVIOR OF INTEGRAL ABUTMENT BRIDGES Andreas Paraschos, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Amde M. Amde Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering This research includes parametric studies performed with the use of three-dimensional nonlinear finite element models in order to investigate the effects...

As offshore exploration and development of oil fields reach water depths of 1,000 to 3,000 m, novel methods of anchoring production platforms become attractive due to cost savings associated with installation. Surface production systems that are viable in these water depths include Tension Leg Platforms (TLP), spar platforms, and laterally moored ship-shaped and semisubmersible vessels. Possibl...

Design of foundations in earthquake prone areas needs special considerations. Shallow foundations may experience a reduction in bearing capacity and increase in settlement and tilt due to seismic loading. The reduction in bearing capacity depends on the nature and type of soil and ground acceleration parameters. In the case of piles, the soil-pile behavior under earthquake loading is generally ...

The N -heap Wythoff’s game is a two-player impartial game with N piles of tokens of sizes A, . . . , A , A ≤ · · · ≤ A . Players take turns removing any number of tokens from a single pile, or removing (a1, . . . , aN ) from all piles — ai tokens from the i-th pile, providing that 0 ≤ ai ≤ A, ∑N i=1 ai > 0 and a1 ⊕ · · · ⊕ aN = 0, where ⊕ is the nim addition. The first player that cannot make a...

We used highly variable, so-called 'ambient' images to test whether expressions affect the identity recognition of real-world facial images. Using movie segments of two actors unknown to our participants, we created image pairs - each image within a pair being captured from the same film segment. This ensured that, within pairs, variables such as lighting were constant whilst expressiveness dif...

[1] Seismic tomography has revealed two large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs) in the lowermost mantle beneath the central Pacific and Africa. The LLSVPs are further shown to be compositionally different from their surroundings. Among several hypotheses put forth in recent years to explain the cause of the LLSVPs, one postulates that they are thermochemical piles caused by accumulation of ...

Previous work on the maximum angle of stability of granular material piles had shown a dip pattern, with lower angles of stability for mixtures of hexagons and dimers or singles made out of ball bearings. This purpose of this study was to confirm this pattern for mixtures of different shapes, namely doubles and large diamonds and small and large triangles. This was done by recording footage of ...

This paper is about cubic sand grains moving around on nicely packed columns in one dimension (the physical sand pile is two dimensional, but the support of sand columns is one dimensional). The Kadanoff Sand Pile Model is a discrete dynamical system describing the evolution of a finite number of stacked grains —as they would fall from an hourglass— to a stable configuration. Grains move accord...