Laboratories and test houses keep a "pool" of test subjects that volunteer to be participants in life jacket approval testing, which is believed to be an incorrect procedure. Fifty-six participants donned 8 child/infant life jackets onto 4 infant manikins in random order with time and accuracy of donning recorded. Average donning time for all 8 life jackets decreased significantly after the fir...

It is easy to visually distinguish a ceramic knife from one made of steel, a leather jacket from one made of denim, and a plush toy from one made of plastic. Most studies of material appearance have focused on the estimation of specific material properties such as albedo or surface gloss, and as a consequence, almost nothing is known about how we recognize material categories like leather or pl...

A plasticity model to predict the behavior of confined concrete is developed. The model is designed to implicitly account for the increase in strength and ductility due to confining a concrete member. The concrete model is implemented into a finite element (FE) model. By implicitly including the change in the strength and ductility in the material model, the confining material can be explicitly...

When a jack-up installed at a clay location and then leaves; it can create several meter deep footprints. In case of soft clay, the spudcan may have actually penetrated much deeper than the observed footprints. When the penetrated spudcan is pulled out, much of the soft remolded clay will flow around it and go back into the hole. This event, leaving a deep region of disturbed soil. The disturbe...

The irregular wave disturbance attenuation problem for jacket-type offshore platforms involving the nonlinear characteristics is studied. The main contribution is that a digital-control-based approximation of optimal wave disturbances attenuation controller (AOWDAC) is proposed based on iteration control theory, which consists of a feedback item of offshore state, a feedforward item of wave for...

Within the framework of a systems approach, the design of a high performance stainless steel integrated processing/structure/property/performance relations with mechanistic computational models. Using multicomponent thermodynamic and diffusion software platforms, the models were integrated to design a carburizable, secondary-hardening, martensitic stainless steel for advanced gear and bearing a...