Occurrence of top down and bottom up fatigue cracking in asphaltic pavements is common. Conventional pavement analysis methods ignore the existence of cracks in asphaltic layers. However, it seems that the responses of cracked pavement would not be the same as a pavement without crack. This paper describes effects of crack type, position and length, and vehicles tire inflation pressure and axle...

the nonlocal nonlinear buckling of a double layer graphene sheet (dlgs) covered by zinc oxide (zno) piezoelectric layers is investigated in this study. the surrounding circumstances of the system are considered as a pasternak foundation including spring constants and a shear layer. graphene sheets are subjected to longitudinal magnetic field and biaxial forces. on the other hand, the zno piezoe...

the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of a period of interval training and step taper on weight changes and endurance performance in male rats during puberty. in this experimental study, 40 male wistar rats (3 weeks old) were randomly divided into exercise and control groups. after 6 weeks of incremental interval training, exercise group was divided in to 3 groups of 3-week taper ...

It is generally accepted that residual stresses present in welded joints alter the conditions for fracture initiation by contributing to the crack-driving force. In this study, it is shown that weld residual stresses also alter crack-tip constraint, affecting fracture in an additional way. The fracture behavior of two crack geometries, a large pressure shell and a small fracture specimen, both ...

The aim of this exploratory study was to identify the most influential training designs during the final six weeks of training (F6T) before a major swimming event, taking into account athletes' evolution over several seasons. Fifteen female and 17 male elite swimmers were followed for one to nine F6T periods. The F6T was divided into two sub-periods of a three-week overload period (OP) and a th...

PURPOSE To examine the effectiveness of threshold and polarized models in the training organization of Chinese top-level sprint speed skaters using a 2-y quasi-experimental design. METHODS Two years (2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons) of the Chinese national speed-skating team's daily training load (N = 9; 5 men, 23.6 ± 1.7 y, weight 76.6 ± 4.1 kg, competitive experience 5.0 ± 0.8 y, 500-m time 35....

Speech is a promising modality for the convenient measurement of cognitive load, and recent years have seen the development of several cognitive load classification systems. Many of these systems have utilised mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and prosodic features like pitch and intensity to discriminate between different cognitive load levels. However, the accuracies obtained by thes...

PURPOSE Inspiratory muscle training (IMT) is a rehabilitation therapy for stable patients with COPD. However, its therapeutic effect remains undefined due to the unclear nature of diaphragmatic mobilization during IMT. Diaphragmatic mobilization, represented by transdiaphragmatic pressure (Pdi), and neural respiratory drive, expressed as the corrected root mean square (RMS) of the diaphragmatic...