Asphalt mixture compaction is an important procedure of asphalt mixture construction and can significantly affect the performance of asphalt pavement. Many laboratory compaction methods (or devices), have been developed to study the asphalt mixture compaction. Nevertheless, the whole process from the selection of aggregate to laboratory compaction is still time-consuming and requires significant human and material resources. In order to better understand asphalt mixture compaction, some researchers began to use finite element method (FEM) to study and analyze mixture compaction. However, FEM is a continuum approach and lacks the ability to take into account the slippage and interlocking of aggregates during compaction. Discrete Element Method (DEM) is a discontinuum analysis method, which can simulate the deformation process of joint systems or discrete particle assembly under quasi-static and dynamic condition. Therefore, it can overcome the shortcomings of FEM and is a more effective tool than FEM to simulate asphalt mixture compaction. In this study, an open source 3D DEM code implemented with the C++ programming language was modified and applied to simulate the compaction of hot-mix asphalt (HMA). A viscoelastic contact model was developed in the DEM code and was verified through comparison with well established analytical solutions. The input parameters of the newly developed contact model were obtained through nonlinear regression analysis of dynamic modulus test results. Two commonly used compaction methods (Superpave gyratory compaction and asphalt vibratory compaction) and one linear kneading compaction based on APA machine were simulated using the DEM code, and the DEM compaction models were verified through the comparison between the DEM predicted results and the laboratory measured test results. The air voids distribution within the asphalt specimens was also analyzed by post processing virtual DEM compaction digital specimens and the level of heterogeneity of the air void distribution within the specimens in the vertical and lateral directions was studied. The DEM simulation results in this study were in a relatively good agreement with the experimental data and previous research results, which demonstrates that the DEM is a feasible method to simulate asphalt mixture compaction under different loading conditions and, with further research, it could be a potentially helpful tool for asphalt mix design by reducing the number of physical compactions in the laboratory.

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Les ouvrages qui utilisent le sol compacte comme matériau de construction nécessitent d'un contrôle du compactage pendent le processus de compaction in situ. Généralement, ce contrôle est fait par essais normalises bases sur les valeurs de teneur en eau et de masse volumique du sol. Pour arriver à ces valeurs, les essais de contrôle sont soit couteux et dangereux ou bien ils demandent beaucoup de temps. Dans ce projet de maîtrise, une méthodologie simple de contrôle du compactage du sol in situ a été développée. Cette nouvelle méthodologie est fondée sur la lecture d'une sonde de teneur en eau enfoncée à la superficie du sol à analyser. La lecture est prise rapidement a I'aide d'un appareil portatif concis lie a la sonde. Une courbe de calibration est préparée en laboratoire particulièrement pour le sol en question et utilisée pour convertir la lecture de la sonde en teneur en eau volumique. Avec I'aide d'équations connues de la géotechnique, la teneur en eau volumique est transformée en masse volumique et conséquemment en teneur en eau massique. Ce mémoire de maîtrise présente le développement, la comparaison avec d'autres méthodes et l'application in situ et en laboratoire de cette méthodologie développée, dans un premier temps pour trois sols de caractéristiques géotechniques différentes. L'analyse des résultats de la méthodologie proposée est accomplie par comparaison avec d'autres méthodes de contrôle du compactage.

Vibratory rollers are commonly used for compaction of embankments and landfills. This task is time consuming and constitutes a significant part of most large construction and infrastructure projects. By improving the compaction efficiency, the construction industry would reduce costs and environmental impact. This research project studies the influence of the vibration frequency of the drum, which is normally a fixed roller property, and whether resonance can be utilized to improve the compaction efficiency. The influence of frequency on roller compaction has not before been studied but the concept of resonance compaction has previously been applied successfully in deep compaction of fills and natural deposits. In order to examine the influence of vibration frequency on the compaction of granular soil, small-scale compaction tests of sand were conducted under varying conditions with a vertically oscillating plate. Subsequently, full-scale tests were conducted using a vibratory soil compaction roller and a test bed of crushed gravel. The results showed that resonance can be utilized in soil compaction by vibratory rollers and plates and that the optimum compaction frequency from an energy perspective is at, or slightly above, the coupled compactor-soil resonant frequency. Since rollers operate far above resonance, the compaction frequency can be significantly reduced, resulting in a considerable reduction in fuel consumption, environmental impact and machine wear. The thesis also presents an iterative equivalent-linear method to calculate the frequency response of a vibrating foundation, such as a compacting plate or the drum of a roller. The method seems promising for predicting the resonant frequency of the roller-soil system and can be used to determine the optimum compaction frequency without site- and roller-specific measurements. / <p>QC 20160613</p>

Research was conducted over a 2-year period at the University of Arizona Campus and Oracle Agricultural Centers to evaluate the effectiveness of surface imprintation in revegetating arid lands. Introduction of forage leguminous species into arid rangelands through land imprintat ion was another objective of this study. The soil at the Campus Center is a Brasito, mixed thermic, typic torripsamment with a sandy-loam texture. This was compared with a White House, fine mixed thermic, Ustollic haplargid with a sandyloam texture at the Oracle Center. Natural rains were the only source of irrigation at Oracle. At the Campus Center, however, a sprinkler irrigation system was installed to match rains with that at the Oracle Center. Three cover treatments together with four surface treatments were used at both sites. The cover treatments included a pure stand of grasses, a pure stand of legumes, and a mixture of both grasses and legumes. The surface treatments were imprinted, mulched, imprinted-mulched, and an untreated surface as a check. Surface imprintation was performed by a land imprinter at Oracle and by a hand imprinter at Campus. The imprinted surface significantly increased soil moisture retention, number of plants per unit area, plant height, plant cover, and biomass compared to the untreated surface. At the Oracle Center, the imprinted surface improved legume germination by 800% over the untreated surface, and by 367% over the mulched one. Corresponding percentages at Campus were 48 and 4% over the untreated and the mulched surfaces, respectively. Increases in biomass production achieved through surface imprintation were 102% over the untreated surface and 35% over the mulched surface at the Oracle Center. Corresponding increases at Campus were 63 and 33% over the untreated and the mulched surfaces, respectively. Plants grown on imprinted surfaces exhibited higher transpiration rates, lower diffusive resistance, and cooler leaf temperature compared to those grown on the untreated surfaces. Addition of mulch to the imprinted surface made no significant differences with respect to the parameters measured when compared to the imprinted surface without mulch. When mulch was used as a separate treatment, however, it significantly increased the parameters measured over the untreated surface. The effect of cover treatments on growth parameters and biomass production was masked by seasonality. Grasses tended to be superior over legumes in samples taken during the fall and the opposite was true during the summer. Mixing legumes with grasses, however, resulted in significantly taller grasses compared to grasses grown as a pure stand.

As the complexity of embedded systems grows, there is an increasing use of operating systems (OSes) in embedded devices, such as mobile phones, media players and other consumer electronics. Despite their convenience and flexibility, such operating systems can be overly general and contain features and code that are not needed in every application context, which incurs unnecessary performance overheads. In most embedded systems, resources, such as processing power, available memory, and power consumption, are strictly constrained. In particular, the amount of memory on embedded devices is often very limited. This, together with the popular usage of operating systems in embedded devices, makes it important to reduce the memory footprint of operating systems. This dissertation addresses this challenge and presents automated ways to reduce the memory footprint of OS kernels for embedded systems. First, we present kernel code compaction, an automated approach that reduces the code size of an OS kernel statically by removing unused functionality. OS kernel code tends to be different from ordinary application code, including the presence of a significant amount of hand-written assembly code, multiple entry points, implicit control flow paths involving interrupt handlers, and frequent indirect control flow via function pointers. We use a novel "approximated compilation" technique to apply source-level pointer analysis to hand-written assembly code. A prototype implementation of our idea on an Intel x86 platform and a minimally configured Linux kernel obtains a code size reduction of close to 24%.Even though code compaction can remove a portion of the entire OS kernel code, when exercised with typical embedded benchmarks, such as MiBench, most kernel code is executed infrequently if at all. Our second contribution is on-demand code loading, an automated approach that keeps the rarely used code on secondary storage and loads it into main memory only when it is needed. In order to minimize the overhead of code loading, a greedy node-coalescing algorithm is proposed to group closely related code together. The experimental results show that this approach can reduce memory requirements for the Linux kernel code by about 53%with little degradation in performance. Last, we describe dynamic data structure compression, an approach that reduces the runtime memory footprint of dynamic data structures in an OS kernel. A prototype implementation for the Linux kernel reduces the memory consumption of the slab allocators in Linux by 17.5%when running the MediaBench suite while incurring only minimal increases in execution time (1.9%).

Field and greenhouse studies were conducted in 1986 and 1987 to determine the impact of disturbance of microphytic soil crust on emergence of two warm season grass species. In the greenhouse, emergence of seedlings sown on the top of undisturbed crust, under the crust, on disturbed crust, and on bare soil was studied. The mean number of seedlings of "Cochise" lovegrass (Eragrostis lehmanniana x Eragrostis tricophora) and Kleingrass (Panicum coloratum) was higher on disturbed field plots than undisturbed plots. Disturbance reduced the microphytic crust cover, and the crust did not recover throughout the growing season. Presence of seedlings in samples of litter washed off the plots and observation on ants showed that all the seeds sown did not remain on the plots during the growing season. In greenhouse flats the emergence of seedlings of both species was greater on disturbed microphytic crust and bare soil than when seeded on top of or under an intact crust. Undisturbed crust restricted penetration of roots and shoots when seeds were placed on or under the crust.

Le contexte de ces travaux de thèse est la nécessité de développer des procédés innovants pour produire des matériaux nouveaux ou aux propriétés améliorées. Une des solutions envisagées est l'élaboration de matériaux denses nanostructurés. L'objectif a été de concevoir et développer un dispositif de mise en forme de matériaux pulvérulents par frittage FLASH, couplé à la possibilité de réaliser une compaction dynamique, en vue d'obtenir des matériaux aux microstructures originales. Dans un premier temps, le développement et la conception du dispositif ont été réalisés. La suite de l'étude a eu pour objectif l'analyse et la compréhension du fonctionnement du dispositif à travers une analyse mécanique et une étude des matériaux. L'étude mécanique a permis de déterminer la manière dont se propagent les ondes dans ce nouveau dispositif. L'objectif a été la mise en place d'une méthode de correction de propagation des ondes dans le dispositif DCRS, qui pourrait permettre d'estimer l'énergie stockée dans le matériau due à la déformation à partir de l'obtention des courbes contrainte-déformation. L'insertion des éléments en graphite permettant de réaliser le frittage des matériaux pulvérulents provoque en effet une discontinuité mécanique avec les barres métalliques, perturbant la propagation des ondes élastiques. L'étude de l'effet du graphite est déterminée par une étude numérique, et confirmée par les résultats expérimentaux. Une méthode corrective a été mise en place afin de corriger l'effet du graphite sur la propagation des ondes élastiques. L'étude matériaux a permis d'étudier les effets de la compaction dynamique sur les propriétés physiques de différents matériaux mise en forme avec le dispositif DCRS. Une première étape a été la détermination des mécanismes de durcissement d'un cuivre Oxide dispersion Strengthened (ODS) mise en forme avec le dispositif DCRS. L'objectif était d'estimer l'énergie stockée dans le matériau lors de la compaction dynamique pour une température de frittage donnée. Après la caractérisation du cuivre ODS réalisée et les paramètres de mise en forme du cuivre ODS définis, l'analyse des mécanismes de durcissement a permis d'identifier les perspectives pour l'optimisation de la mise en forme de tels matériaux. Une seconde étape a abordé les relations entre microstructures et propriétés physiques dans un nickel pur via les variations de vitesses d'impact et de température auxquelles est effectuée la compaction dynamique lors d'un cycle thermique défini. Les phénomènes physiques de réorganisation microstructurale intervenant lors de la compaction dynamique comme la recristallisation dynamique et le stockage de l'énergie ont ainsi été mis en évidence / This works investigates a new process development in order to consolidate materials with original microstructures thus improved properties. The technological approach was to use powder metallurgy processes and combine FAST sintering with dynamic compaction. In parallel to elastic wave propagation study into the system, a systematic parametric study on the influence of the processing parameters on the material properties was made

M.Sc. (Med. (Paediatric Cardiology)), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, 2008 / Left ventricular (LV) noncompaction is characterized by the presence of an extensive trabecular myocardial layer within the luminal aspect of the compact myocardium of the ventricular wall. The trabeculae are both excessive in number and more prominent than normal. Noncompaction may occur in isolation usually with clinical features of dilated cardiomyopathy, or it may be associated with congenital or acquired heart diseases. Echocardiography is the reference standard for diagnosis, where a ratio of thickness of trabecular-to-compact myocardium (compaction ratio) of >2 is a major diagnostic criterion. Noncompaction is usually considered to result from persistence of the highly trabeculated myocardium found in early cardiogenesis of the human embryo. If persistence of excess trabeculae is the only determinant of the compaction ratio it would be expected that it would remain a consistent measurement in postnatal life. However, temporal changes in the degree of noncompaction in individual case reports have raised the question as to whether the compaction ratio might be sensitive to haemodynamic or other factors. In the present dissertation, I assessed echocardiographically whether the compaction ratio is associated with increases in indices of LV volume preload in 100 children or adolescents with ventricular septal defects (VSD), and 36 with chronic rheumatic heart disease (RHD). Compared to 79 normal controls (compaction ratio=1.4±0.07), patients with VSDs (compaction ratio=2.0±0.2, p<0.0001) and RHD (compaction ratio = 2.0±0.3, p< 0.0001) had a marked increase in the compaction ratio. A compaction ratio>2 was found in 42% of patients with VSDs and 47% with RHD. In VSDs, independent of age and gender, the compaction ratio was positively associated with LV mass index (LVMI) (partial r=0.44, p<0.0001), VSD size (partial r=0.4, p<0.0001), LV end diastolic diameter indexed (LVEDD) (partial r=0.24, p= 0.01), and the presence of additional shunts (partial r=0.21, p=0.02). In RHD, independent of age and gender, the compaction ratio was positively associated with LVEDD (partial r=0.62, p=0.0001), and LVMI (partial r=0.48, p=0.005), and negatively with LV ejection fraction (partial r=0.31, p=0.03). The strong association of indices of LV volume load and the compaction ratio would suggest that haemodynamic influences are contributing to the compaction ratio both in congenital and acquired cardiac disease in childhood. Thus an increased compaction ratio may be the consequence of an increased volume preload, and therefore may not necessarily occur only as a result of persistence of embryonic patterns.

Os processos adotados no controle tecnológico das obras de pavimentação mantêm, ainda, procedimentos e metodologias convencionais que fornecem subsídios técnicos para uma avaliação indireta das propriedades mecânicas das camadas do pavimento e da estrutura como um todo, muitas vezes insuficientes para a interpretação das condições de deformabilidade in situ dos pavimentos. O trabalho proposto constitui uma contribuição para o aperfeiçoamento das técnicas de controle tecnológico de obras rodoviárias com a determinação das propriedades mecânicas e de deformabilidade das camadas de pavimento e terrapleno a partir de ensaios dinâmicos de campo com o uso do equipamento Light Weight Deflectometer (LWD). São apresentadas proposições de metodologias para aplicação sistemática do LWD na avaliação e diagnóstico das propriedades mecânicas de sistemas de camada de pavimento, bem como, no controle tecnológico de obras de pavimentação. O escopo do trabalho é fundamentalmente de natureza experimental com a apresentação de estudo de caso realizado pelo autor em obras viárias em andamento, incorporando-se também resultados de pesquisas e estudos disponíveis na literatura internacional. Buscou-se definir procedimentos e metodologias específicas para a obra da BR-101/NE, que possibilitassem a aplicação dos ensaios dinâmicos com o LWD na totalidade do empreendimento de forma homogênea e padronizada, empregando-se também relações que facultam a determinação das propriedades mecânicas das camadas dos pavimentos com exatidão e representatividade. Para os objetivos em questão foi programado experimentos em seções testes da rodovia, segmento situado entre a cidade de João Pessoa e a divisa dos estados de Pernambuco e Paraíba (lote de obra 5), no qual foram previstos ensaios com o DCP - cone de penetração, LWD e Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD), bem como a caracterização completa dos solos e materiais constituintes das camadas finais de terraplenagem. / The adopted process in technological control of pavement work, maintains yet, conventional procedures and methodologies that supply technical subsidies for an indirect evaluation about mechanical properties of pavement layers, and the structure as a whole, many times insufficient for an interpretation in situ deformability conditions of the pavement. The proposed work consists of a contribution for the improvement of the technological control of road work techniques with the determination of mechanical properties and the deformability of pavement layers from dynamic fields rehearsals, using the Light Weight Deflectometer (LWD) equipment. Methodology propositions will be present for the systematic application of LWD in evaluations and diagnostic of the mechanical properties of pavement layers system, as well as, pavement works technological control. The paper scope is fundamentally about experimental nature, with the presentation about case studies accomplished by the author in road works in process, also incorporating research results and available studies of international literature about this topic. It was looked to define specific procedure and methodology for the BR-101/NE works, which the application in LWD dynamic rehearsals can be made possible, in enterprise totality in homogeneous and patronized form, use them also in relations that allow the pavement layers mechanical property determination with the owed accuracy warranty. For the objectives in question, were programmed experiments in road tests sections, this one situated between João Pessoa city and the boundary with Pernambuco state, that were foreseen rehearsals with the DCP - Dynamic Cone Penetrometer, LWD and Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD), as well as the full characterization of soils and materials constituted by the final layers of leveling.