Cylindrical shells, unstiffened or stiffened with rings and/or stringers are commonly used in offshore structures as main loading-carrying members. Comprehensive theoretical work and experimental studies on the buckling behavior of cylindrical shells have been carried out in the past. The increasing offshore application of stiffened cylindrical shells has raised some new challenges that need to...

The Layerwise Shell Theory is used to model discretely stiffened laminated composite plates and cylindrical shells for stress, vibration, pre-buckling and post-buckling analyses. The layerwise theory reduces a 3-D problem to a 2-D problem by expanding the 3-D displacement field as a function of a surface-wise 2-D displacement field and a 1-D interpolation polynomial through the shell thickness....

The SAIBA framework proposes two interface languages to represent separately an intelligent agent’s communicative functions (or intents) and the multimodal behavior determining how the functions are accomplished with a particular multimodal realization. For the functional level, the Function Markup Language (FML) has been proposed. In this paper we summarize the current status of FML as discuss...

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of an ophthalmic solution containing 0.1% fluorometholone (FML) and 0.1% sodium hyaluronate (HA) for the treatment of ocular dryness in Sjögren syndrome (SS) patients.Forty SS patients were randomly assigned to the FML or cyclosporin A (CsA) treatment groups. The FML group was treated with 0.1% FML and 0.1% HA, and the CsA group was treated ...

We have recently proposed a new concept for deployable reflectors consisting of a thin parabolic carbon-fibre-reinforced-plastic (CFRP) shell stiffened along the edge by an elastically collapsible stiffener. Here we show that a stiffener accounting for less than 10% of the total mass of the reflector increases the stiffness of the softest deformation mode of the deployed reflector by 48 times, ...

Different analytical approaches can be used to model the forced response of the beam-stiffened plates or shells that are commonly found in many practical structures from ships to aircraft. A popular method is to smear the mass and stiffness properties of the beam stiffeners to give an orthotropic plate or shell. This is simpler than modelling discrete stiffeners. This paper considers the exampl...

The high efficiency of monocoque cylindrical shells in carrying axial loads is curtailed by their extreme sensitivity to imperfections. For practical applications, this issue has been alleviated by introducing closely stiffened shells which, however, require expensive manufacturing. Here we present an alternative approach that provides a fundamentally different solution. We design symmetry-brea...

A belt-conveyor bridge is built inside a ring-stiffened cylindrical shell. The unknown variables are the shell thickness as well as the thickness and the number of flat rings. Optimum solutions are evaluated for different bridge lengths. The design constraints relate to the local shell buckling strength, to the panel ring buckling and to the deflection of the bridge. The cost function includes ...

The potential effect of the fucose mannose ligand (FML)-vaccine on immunotherapy of canine visceral leishmaniasis was assayed on five mongrel dogs experimentally infected with Leishmania donovani and on 21 Leishmania chagasi naturally infected dogs when seropositive to FML but completely asymptomatic. The clinical signs of the experimentally infected, symptomatic dogs only disappeared after the...

The Fucose-Mannose Ligand (FML) of Leishmania donovani is a complex glycoproteic fraction. Its potential use as a tool for diagnosis of human visceral leishmaniasis was tested with human sera from Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The FML-ELISA test, showed 100% sensitivity and 96% specificity, identifying patients with overt kala-azar (p < 0.001, when compared to normal sera), and subjects w...