BACKGROUND Crack cocaine use is known to contribute to poor adherence to antiretroviral medications; however, little is known about facilitators of or barriers to effective HIV treatment use among HIV-infected crack cocaine users. We sought to identify correlates of optimal pharmacy refill adherence for antiretroviral medications and plasma HIV RNA viral load (pVL) suppression among this popula...

The main purpose of this paper is to give an overview of some recent progress made in modelling of deterioration of reinforced concrete structures. The review is not claimed to be complete. It is based on some of the author’s contributions in this research area especially the papers (Thoft-Christensen 2001) and (ThoftChristensen, Svensson and Frandsen 2005). In the paper, corrosion of reinforce...

The assumption of ellipsoidal flaw geometry has been widely used in calculations of the probability of structural failure conditioned on nondestructive (ND) measurements. Clearly, in most cases the flaw geometry is not ellipsoidal and in the particular case of cracks the actual geometry may deviate significantly from a degenerate ellipsoid (i.e., a planar crack with an elliptical plan-view shap...

The effect of the specimen (or component) thickness has been shown to have a significant effect on closure behaviour and this seems to be related to the relative size of the plastic zone. Real cracks are inherently three-dimensional; plane stress-like behaviour is found close to the region where the crack front intersects the free surface, whereas most of the crack front will experience somethi...

Abstract A viscoelastic material which is stretched and then held at constant elongation, normally results in decreasing stresses till the equilibrium has been reached. With a crack propagation not expected as energy of system decreasing. However, an initial damage could lead to increase mechanical load on undamaged chains during relaxation, leading degradation propagation. While experimental i...