Rational design of hybrid polymetallic structures taking into account mass loads

Рассмотрена проблема рационального (оптимального) проектирования высотных или административно-управленческих сооружений при активном использовании гибридных полиметаллических стандартизированных элементов, создаваемых на основе различных надежно разработанных технологий. Целью решения проблемы является подбор и перераспределение материалов, при которых с обеспечением требуемых комфортных и безопасных условий существования будут значительно улучшены экономические показатели создаваемого проекта. В качестве гарантированных требований комфортного существования использованы разработанные автором три различия критерия деформативности фазовых материалов в условиях заданных типов и полей внешних нагрузок. Первый критерий: «предельно допустимое упругое состояние» - когда ни один из фазовых материалов не будет деформироваться за пределом упругости. Второй критерий: «предельно допустимые деформации упрочнения» - когда фазовые материалы не переходят в состояние разупрочнения. Третий критерий: «предельно допустимые деформации разрушения» - когда какой-либо из фазовых материалов будет «локально» разрушаться. При расчетах учитывается, что ряд физических характеристик материалов в широких пределах технологических переработок довольно устойчиво сохраняют свои значения и используются как заранее известные данные из справочной литературы. К ним относятся пределы упругости и прочности, модули Юнга, удельные плотности и стоимости фазовых материалов. Такая малочувствительная технологическая устойчивость позволила для всех фазовых материалов при аппроксимации диаграммы деформирования различных металлических материалов использовать единообразную зависимость в виде кубической параболы, коэффициенты которой и упомянутые три предельно допустимые деформации выражаются через устойчивые характеристики - пределы упругости, прочности и модуль Юнга. На основе известных кинематических и статических гипотез описания неупругого деформирования стержневых систем для всех типов предельно-допустимых деформаций, получены единообразные системы уравнений, которые позволяют для заданных условий внешнего воздействия определить геометрические параметры и топологическую структуру распределения всех фазовых материалов по конструкции. В качестве внешних воздействий на конструкцию высотного сооружения рассматриваются традиционные ветровые нагрузки с заданным законом изменения вдоль вертикальной оси, заданные моменты и силы на верхнем вертикальном срезе и изменяемые при топологических перераспределениях массовые нагрузки. Степень усовершенствования проекта оценивается на основе анализа изменения введенных относительных характеристик несущей способности, податливости и стоимости проекта. Для сравнения используется эталонный проект из однородного материала. The problem of rational (optimal) design of high-rise or administrative and management structures with the active use of hybrid polymetallic standardized elements, created on the basis of various reliably developed technologies, is considered. The purpose of solving the problem is the selection and redistribution of materials, in which, with the provision of the required comfortable and safe conditions of existence, the economic indicators of the project being created will be significantly improved. Three differences in the deformability criterion of phase materials under conditions of specified types and fields of external loads, developed by the author, were used as guaranteed requirements for comfortable existence. The first criterion: "maximum permissible elastic state when none of the phase materials will deform beyond the elastic limit. The second criterion: "maximum permissible hardening deformations when phase materials do not pass into a softening state. The third criterion: "maximum permissible fracture strains when any of the phase materials will "locally"fail. The calculations take into account that a number of physical characteristics of materials in a wide range of technological processing rather stably retain their values and are used as data known in advance from the reference literature. These include the limits of elasticity and strength, Young’s moduli, specific densities and costs of phase materials. Such a low-sensitivity technological stability made it possible for all phase materials to use a uniform dependence in the form of a cubic parabola for approximating the deformation diagram of various metallic materials, the coefficients of which and the above three maximum permissible deformations are expressed in terms of stable characteristics - the limits of elasticity, strength and Young’s modulus. On the basis of the known kinematic and static hypotheses of the description of inelastic deformation of rod systems for all types of maximum permissible deformations, uniform systems of equations are obtained that allow for the given conditions of external action to determine the geometric parameters and the topological structure of the distribution of all phase materials over the structure. Traditional wind loads with a given law of variation along the vertical axis, given moments and forces on the upper vertical cut, and mass loads varying during topological redistributions are considered as external influences on the structure of a high-rise structure. The degree of improvement of the project is estimated based on the analysis of changes in the entered relative characteristics of bearing capacity, flexibility and cost of the project. For comparison, a reference design from a homogeneous material is used.

An Offer You Can Refuse: A Host Country's Strategic Allocation of Development Financing

Hydropower projects are one of the leading energy sectors being developed in Africa. In the past two decades, this demand has been increasingly met by Chinese financing and Chinese contractors, creating an impression that host countries have no choice but to accept Chinese advances against their preferences. This essay demonstrates through the case study of the Mount Coffee hydropower project in Liberia that host countries strategically allocate financing from different sources to different projects, based on domestic development needs, administrative capacity, flexibility of financiers, and institutional memory between the host and the financiers. This essay also shows that concerns over Chinese contractors' environmental- and social-impact records reflect a combination of host enforcement, financier self-sorting, and Chinese contractors' own perceptions of their comparative advantage. More broadly, this case study provides empirical observations of host countries' agency and strategic calculus in the financier-host relation, as well as the limits of China's role in Africa's hydropower sector.

Are three months multidisciplinary lifestyle intervention enough to get benefits on blood pressure in overweight/obese adults ?

The aim of the study is to determine the effects of a multidisciplinary lifestyle intervention (including a short period of physical exercise) on some health-related variables, particularly on blood pressure, in an overweight/obese adult group. The main outcome was blood pressure lowering. The study involved 378 subjects affected by obesity or type 2 diabetes. The intervention included exercise, nutrition and psychological aspects. Before and after the intervention, several anthropometrics, cardiovascular risk related measures (height, body weight, body mass index, waist circumference, body composition and WHTR index) and physical exercise measures (aerobic capacity, flexibility and dynamic muscle strength) were evaluated through fitness tests. We observed a significant reduction in: blood pressure values, body weight, BMI, waist circumference, WHTR, fat mass and an improvement of fat free mass and physical exercise measures. The C.U.R.I.A.Mo. multidisciplinary approach is effective for reducing blood pressure, after relatively few exercise sessions (three weeks), particularly in patients with hypertension. The intervention can ameliorate the health status and physical performance in the short term, in normotensive and hypertensive adult subjects with overweight/obesity.

An Application of Goal Programming Variants to Evaluate Outsourcing Strategies in the Clothing Industry

International outsourcing has provided the immense cost savings to the clothing companies. Today, the companies are reconsidering the reshoring and relocation due to the factors such as increasing cost, lead time uncertainty, and demand nature. In such situations, the domestic destinations provide capacity flexibility. Choice of the compatible strategy for a given situation prevents the associated loss in the business. This paper evaluates the outsourcing and reshoring phenomenon based on realistic outsourcing objectives in the textile supply chain. This paper develops a goal programming model to analyze the outsourcing strategies for cost and capacity flexibility. Minimization of the capacity inflexibility was considered as the capacity flexibility. Cost and capacity inflexibility were used as two objective functions. The optimization model was solved using the three important variants of goal programming. Comparison of results from three different techniques provides several insights for precise outsourcing decision making. For instance, the companies can choose a compatible strategy to maintain the cost and capacity flexibility at an acceptable level. Instead of only the cost saving, the reshoring decision making should be based on all the real criteria. The key focus of this paper is the clothing industry. The results may be different for other manufacturing sectors. Due to the increased globalization, the textile companies have been facing various challenges such as outsourcing destination selection for maximum profit and the reshoring debates. To address such challenges, this study provides various insights to the textile industry based on realistic objectives of outsourcing (i.e., cost and capacity flexibility). It is difficult to quantify the flexibility. This paper develops new ideas to quantify the capacity flexibility. The application of three different variants of goal programming provides the alternative solutions.

An architecture of 5G based on SDN NV wireless network

<span>The unexpected increase demand growth of broadband traffic, rapid advancement in networking and internet technology led to the growth in Internet-connected devices to sensor networks, and machine type communication devices. These increases bring more challenges in network capacity and connectivity. The use of the new 5G technology continues to address these challenges by providing high data rates, low latency, and more mobility with highly and densified HetNe deploment. This densified network brings new challenges to service provisioning in future networks based on the recent network paradigm innovations, Network Virtualization and Software Defined Networking to cope with massive broadband connectivity and enhancement of capacity, flexibility, and scalability. This study sets out to present the key features and requirements for 5G HetNet, SDN and NFV. The results of this study generally justify the challenges and how to integrate them into future wireless networks through a proposed 5G-based SDN-NV wireless network architecture to enable best network performance and resource management.</span>

Impact Evaluation of Wind Power Geographic Dispersion on Future Operating Reserve Needs

This paper evaluates the potential of diverse wind power patterns to balance the global power output of wind farms using the concept of operating reserve assessment. To achieve this, operating reserve assessment models are utilized to evaluate bulk generation systems under several conditions of wind power geographic distribution. Different wind behavior patterns and wind power penetration levels are tested using a modified configuration of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Reliability Test System 96 (IEEE RTS-96). The results highlight that on a large country scale system with different wind characteristics, the diversification of wind behavior might be conducive to a compensation of wind power fluctuations, which may significantly decrease the need for system operating reserves. This effect is verified using probability distribution functions of reserve needs estimated by sequential Monte Carlo simulations (SMCS), such that useful information regarding generation capacity flexibility is drawn from the evaluations.

Flexibilidade em crianças e adolescentes brasileiros: uma revisão sistemática

Flexibility is a health-related physical fitness component that has its importance related to the maintenance of functional independence and achievement of activities of the daily living. This systematic review aims to analyze the existing evidence in the literature regarding physical capacity flexibility in Brazilian children and adolescents. Searches were conducted in the Virtual Health Library, Scientific Electronic Library Online, Sportdiscus databases through the EBSCOhost and Pubmed platform. There were 89,553 articles, of which 69,197 were excluded for duplicity, 20,124 for the title, 160 for the abstract, 56 after a full analysis of the article, remaining 16 articles for the qualitative analysis. Of these, from the reading of references, 57 titles partially eligible for the review were identified, and after the application of the eligibility criteria, there were only 18 for the qualitative analysis. Of the 34 studies included for the qualitative analysis, 25 studies were excluded and nine were included in the review. All articles presented the cross-sectional design and used the sit-and-reach test to assess flexibility. It was evidenced that: a) flexibility has been treated as co-adjuvant in studies with children and adolescents; b) although females have absolute flexibility values greater than the opposite sex, males have higher frequency of subjects that meet the health classification criteria in this variable; c) there is greater prevalence of the use of FITNESSGRAM and PROESP-BR reference standards.