From the mid-1980s until 1994, U.S. oil and gas exploration and production steadily declined, forcing a significant increase in U.S. imports of crude oil. For example, in 1994, the United States imported more than 50 percent of the nation's total demand, which was the highest level since 1990. To economically develop U.S. oil production in deep-water locations, the industry needed strong, light...

Author: GAUDIN Michael Affiliation: DER Electricite De France Title: INVERSE IDENTIFICATION AND UPDATING IN VIBRATIONS OF PIPING SYSTEMS Text: This paper concerns the area of vibrations in piping systems of nuclear power plants. One need to represent as better as possible the dynamic behaviour of those systems with respect to the measurements performed on a real structure. In a software develop...

Guided elastic waves in the frequency range of a few hundred kHz, generated and detected by appropriate transducer arrays, are used to monitor the structural integrity of pipes by comparing their actual state with a predefined reference state. For these purposes, theoretical, numerical, and experimental results are combined to study guided wave propagation and wave interaction with relevant def...

Seepage failure in the form of piping can strongly influence the stability of block-in-matrix-soils (bimsoils), as well as weaken and affect the performance of bimsoil structures. The multiple-factor evaluation and optimization play a crucial role in controlling the seepage failure in bimsoil. The aim of this study is to improve the ability to control the piping seepage failure in bimsoil. In t...

Although the concept of concurrent engineering has been widely applied in the manufacturing industry, there is growing awareness and interest in the adoption of Concurrent Engineering (CE) in the Construction Industry because CE has the potential to make construction projects less fragmented, reduce project duration, improve project quality, reduce total project cost and increase project compet...

Acid precipitation may increase human exposure to several potentially toxic metals by increasing metal concentrations in major pathways to man, particularly food and water, and in some instances by enhancing the conversion of metal species to more toxic forms. Human exposures to methylmercury are almost entirely by way of consumption of fish and seafood. In some countries, intakes by this route...

Nowadays, production control problems have been widely studied and a lot of valuable approaches are implemented. This talk addresses the problem of tracking the uncertain demand in case of uncertain production speeds. The uncertainties are described by deterministic inequalities and the performance is analyzed in the from of worst-case scenarios. First, simple mathematical models are introduced...

The Polish government has made a decision to build nuclear power plant (NPP) in the South Baltic coastal zone. This means that three major types of structures will be located nearshore: (1) breakwaters and wharf where ships may dock load unload cargo (harbor), (2) seawalls protecting shore against erosion storm surge floods, (3) an underwater piping system for cold water intake heated discharge...

The design of electrical wiring and hydraulic/pneumatic piping routes in aircraft is a long and repetitive process which is largely done by hand. Presented in this paper is progress in the development of a knowledge based routing system which automates much of the routing process using intelligent algorithms and interchangeable design rules. The system reads three dimensional CAD models to be n...