Abstract

Construction practices in major part of rural as well as suburban areas in India uses brick masonry type of buildings; this may be due to easy availability of material, aesthetic appeal and cost effective. Such type of construction is also found in nearby areas like Nepal and Bangladesh. In India, these buildings are most commonly found in regions where good quality clay for brick production is abundantly available (World housing encyclopaedia report, 2003). In past studies it has been found that brick quality is comparatively better in north part of India than south, this is due to good quality of soil in north India. But, such type of buildings proved to be vulnerable during past history of earthquake. Though, past experimental and analytical studies stress upon understanding behaviour of brick masonry buildings, this numerical study has advantage over others that it can show initiation of crack, gradual propagation of cracks till the total collapse of building. In this parametric study, four cases have been considered and effect of considering infill and without infill on strength, stiffness and ductility of wall has been studied.

Abstract

Overall capacity of a structure depends on the strength and deformation capacities of the individual component of the structure. In order to determine capacities beyond the elastic limits some form of nonlinear analysis such as the pushover procedure is required. This procedure uses a series of sequential elastic analyses, superimposed to approximate a force-displacement capacity diagram of the overall structure. Usually this analysis is performed using FEM and that too with major assumption in defining hinge mechanisms and target displacement. In this paper, a new method for analysis nonlinear static large deformation analysis of bare frame subjected to lateral load is proposed. First we developed the method and later four frames were taken and they were pushed up to failure. Results clearly show the capability of the proposed method.

Abstract

In this paper we propose a framework for optimum steering input determination of all-wheel steer vehicles (AWSV) on rough terrains. The framework computes the steering input which minimizes the tracking error for a given trajectory. Unlike previous methodologies of computing steering inputs of car-like vehicles, the proposed methodology depends explicitly on the vehicle dynamics and can be extended to vehicle having arbitrary number of steering inputs. A fully generic framework has been used to derive the vehicle dynamics and a non-linear programming based constrained optimization approach has been used to compute the steering input considering the instantaneous vehicle dynamics, no-slip and contact constraints of the vehicle. All Wheel steer Vehicles have a special parallel steering ability where the instantaneous centre of rotation (ICR) is at infinity. The proposed framework automatically enables the vehicle to choose between parallel steer and normal operation depending on the error with respect to the desired trajectory. The efficacy of the proposed framework is proved by extensive uneven terrain simulations, for trajectories with continuous or discontinuous velocity profile.

Abstract

A semiconductor ring laser is designed so as to work as an inverted integrator coupling three of such integrators an all-optical Delta Sigma Modulator is designed. The phenomenon of injection locking and switching is used.

Abstract

On the run towards making a photonic processor, which uses the photons of visible light rather than electric current to perform digital computations we propose all optical digital logic gate library consisting of NOR, OR, AND, XOR, and two compound gates. These gates which are designed using semiconductor ring lasers (SRL) are analyzed and modeled by developing rate equations. This digital library can be used in any CAD tool developed to design integrated photonics components. The phenomenon of injection locking is used for the realization of logic gates.

Abstract

A set of tools that demostrate the concept of a re-narration web, that aims to add alternative, target specific narrations of web documents as an extension of the web protocol with the intent of assisting a process of content dissemination and access that is inclusive of non-literate people.

Abstract

We propose Alipi, a distributed and participatory approach for re-narrating web pages for the purpose of rendering the content more accessible. This model supports alternative descriptions for a web page or parts of it via rewriting or re-narration for a given target audience by volunteers. The goal is to render the Web accessible to people across varied abilities, age, economic situation, language and geographic locations. We present the motivation, architecture and prototype implementation of Alipi.

Abstract

The astonishing diversity in folding patterns of RNA three-dimensional (3D) structures is crafted by myriads of noncovalent contacts, of which base pairing and stacking are the most prominent. A systematic and comprehensive classification and annotation of these interactions is necessary for a molecular-level understanding of their roles. However, unlike in the case of base pairing, where a widely accepted nomenclature and classification scheme exists in the public domain, currently available classification schemes for base–base stacking need major enhancements to comprehensively capture the necessary features underlying the rich stacking diversity in RNA. Here, we extend the previous stacking classification based on nucleobase interacting faces by introducing a structurally intuitive geometry-cum topology-based scheme. Specifically, a stack is first classified in terms of the geometry described by the relative orientation of the glycosidic bonds, which generates eight basic stacking geometric families for heterodimeric stacks and six of those for homodimeric stacks. Further annotation in terms of the identity of the bases and the region of involvement of purines (five-membered, six-membered, or both rings) leads to the enumeration of 384 distinct RNA base stacks. Based on our classification scheme, we present an algorithm for automated identification of stacks in RNA crystal structures and analyze the stacking context in selected RNA structures. Overall, the work described here is expected to greatly facilitate the structure-based RNA research.

Abstract

The AXES project participated in the interactive known-item search task (KIS) and the interactive instance search task (INS) for TRECVid 2011. We used the same system architecture and a nearly identical user interface for both the KIS and INS tasks. Both systems made use of text search on ASR, visual concept detectors, and visual similarity search. The user experiments were carried out with media professionals and media students at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, with media professionals performing the KIS task and media students participating in the INS task. This paper describes the results and findings of our experiments.

Abstract

We have applied genetic algorithm optimization for the design of laser pulses to control dissociation process in the ground electronic state of HF molecule, within the mathematical framework of optimal control theory. In order to design the experimentally feasible laser fields, we coded the small set of selected field parameters in the GA parameter space. Two types of pulses, one with fixed frequency components and the other having non-deterministic components have been designed. Optimized laser field obtained using this approach, possesses simple time and frequency structures. We show that the fields having non-deterministic frequency components lead to greater dissociation probability compared to the ones having deterministic frequency components.