Recent research studies have confirmed that curved I-girders are capable of developing substantial shear postbuckling resistance due to tension field action and have demonstrated that the AASHTO LRFD equations for the tension field resistance in straight I-girders may be applied to curved I-girders within specific limits. However, the corresponding demands on intermediate transverse stiffeners in curved I-girders are still largely unknown. Furthermore, a number of prior research studies have demonstrated that transverse stiffeners in straight I-girders are loaded predominantly by bending induced by their restraint of web lateral deflections at the shear strength limit state, not by in-plane tension field forces. This is at odds with present Specification approaches for the design of transverse stiffeners, which are based on (1) providing sufficient stiffener bending rigidity only to develop the shear buckling strength of the web and (2) providing sufficient stiffener area to resist the in-plane tension field forces. In this research, the behavior of one- and two-sided intermediate transverse stiffeners in straight and horizontally curved steel I-girders is investigated by refined full nonlinear finite element analysis. Variations in stiffener rigidity, panel aspect ratio, panel slenderness, and stiffener type are considered. New recommendations for design of transverse stiffeners in straight and curved I-girder bridges are developed by combining the solutions from the above FEA studies with the results from prior research.

Protein structure and motion plays an essential role in nearly all forms of life. Understanding both protein folding and protein conformational change can bring deeper insight to many biochemical processes and even into some devastating diseases thought to be the result of protein misfolding. Experimental methods are currently unable to capture detailed, large-scale motions. Traditional computational approaches (e.g., molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations) are too expensive to simulate time periods long enough for anything but small peptide fragments. This research aims to model such molecular movement using a motion framework originally developed for robotic applications called the Probabilistic Roadmap Method. The Probabilistic Roadmap Method builds a graph, or roadmap, to model the connectivity of the movable object?s valid motion space. We previously applied this methodology to study protein folding and obtained promising results for several small proteins. Here, we extend our existing protein folding framework to handle larger proteins and to study a broader range of motion problems. We present a methodology for incrementally constructing roadmaps until they satisfy a set of evaluation criteria. We show the generality of this scheme by providing evaluation criteria for two types of motion problems: protein folding and protein transitions. Incremental Map Generation eliminates the burden of selecting a sampling density which in practice is highly sensitive to the protein under study and difficult to select. We also generalize the roadmap construction process to be biased towards multiple conformations of interest thereby allowing it to model transitions, i.e., motions between multiple known conformations, instead of just folding to a single known conformation. We provide evidence that this generalized motion framework models large-scale conformational change more realistically than competing methods. We use rigidity theory to increase the efficiency of roadmap construction by introducing a new sampling scheme and new distance metrics. It is only with these rigidity-based techniques that we were able to detect subtle folding differences between a set of structurally similar proteins. We also use it to study several problems related to protein motion including distinguishing secondary structure formation order, modeling hydrogen exchange, and folding core identification. We compare our results to both experimental data and other computational methods.

In this work, an electronic gas company was chosen as a research objective to understand how to execute the strategic planning and competition in an emerging market such as solar cell industry. First, individual industrial analysis was carried out for both electronic gas industry and solar cell industry, which provide the connections and characteristics between these two industrial segments. A project was selected as an example for detail explanation. It covers the initial competition attitudes of individual competitors; the crisis of silane shortage during the new industry segment emerging; how our company deals with the shortage crisis; how to identify the penetration strategies through a series of sales tactics and to confine the competitor advantages in order to obtain the maximum profit. In the conclusions, the track of competition planning was reviewed and the characteristics of gas industry were categorized for future research interests. Meanwhile, related theories were used to compared and contrasted in order to support the business case from the academic approach. At the end, a summary of competition review was included to outline how the organization rigidity causing an near-miss crisis to the overall strategic planning; why the early engagements to the emerging industrial segment is extremely critical to the electronic gas company; how the front line sales and marketing personnel to identify the business opportunities; also how to obtain the necessary resources in an internal competition.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-101).

No description available.

The thesis consists of two main results. The first main result is a proof that C^1 rigidity holds for circle maps with a break point for almost all rotation numbers. The second main result is a proof that C^1 robust rigidity holds for circle maps in the fractional linear transformation (FLT) pair family. That is, for this family, C^1 rigidity holds for all irrational rotation numbers. The approach taken here of proving a more general theorem that C^1 rigidity holds for circle maps with a break point satisfying a `derivatives close condition', allows us to obtain both of our main results as corollaries of this more general theorem.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-72).

Thesis (M.A.)--Sam Houston State University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-44). Also available online (PDF file) by a subscription to the set or by purchasing the individual file.

Thesis (M.A.)--Sam Houston State University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-44).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, August, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.