One approach to the study of wear involves the ch~~te~zation of surface failure under conditions of single-pass sliding. Such an approach has been used to show that the wear of commercial and experimental restorative resins and composites is determined by the resistance of the material to penetration and by the mode of deformation during sliding [l] . The purpose of this investigation was to ch...

The discovery of causal relationships from purely observational data is a fundamental problem in science. The most elementary form of such a causal discovery problem is to decide whether X causes Y or, alternatively, Y causes X, given joint observations of two variables X,Y . This was often considered to be impossible. Nevertheless, several approaches for addressing this bivariate causal discov...

The face stability of shallow tunnels was investigated with small-scale model experiments at single gravity. Aim of the research was to detect the evolution of failure mechanisms in dense and loose soil samples with varying overburden above the tunnel. Moreover, the quality of proposed theoretical/numerical approaches for the determination of a necessary support pressure pf was assessed. The re...

Over the past three years, BMW has undertaken a significant project to first investigate, then proceed with migration from its present crash simulation software to ABAQUS. This project has been motivated by a growing recognition within BMW that, in order to advance its crash simulation methods, improved robustness in the software employed, along with a greater emphasis on physically-motivated s...

In this paper an attempt is made to offer insights into local slope failure mechanisms from the perspective of hydrogeology. The hypothesis examined envisages that the hydraulic conductivity distribution in a weathered profile includes a relatively high hydraulic conductivity zone associated with the jointed rock mass near rockhead. There is evidence locally for such a condition. The groundwate...

System lifespan modeling becomes more complicated when an external event causes the succession of failure in 2 or more system components. Models that don’t consider this common cause failure cause the wrong estimation of system reliability. Let us assume that there are data composed of numbers of successive failures in i, i = 1, ... , n out of n components of system. Data having these character...