Effects of mixing conditions and activator anionic species on the rheology of silicate-activated slag concrete

The proper control of the rheological performance of silicate-based alkali-activated slag (AAS) mixtures is problematic, as the conventional superplasticizers become less effective in alkaline media. Nevertheless, several methods have been proposed to improve the workability of silicate-activated AAS, such as by extending the mixing time, and...

A novel bi-level temporally-distributed MPC approach: An application to green urban mobility

Model predictive control (MPC) has been widely used for traffic management, such as for minimizing the total time spent or the total emissions of vehicles. When long-term green urban mobility is considered including e.g. a constraint on the total yearly emissions, the optimization horizon of the MPC problem is significantly larger than the...

Topological Approach to Measure Network Recoverability

Network recoverability refers to the ability of a network to return to a desired performance level after suffering malicious attacks or random failures. This paper proposes a general topological approach and recoverability indicators to measure the network recoverability in two scenarios: 1) recovery of damaged connections and 2) any...

Statistically optimal estimation of degree-1 and C₂₀ coefficients based on GRACE data and an ocean bottom pressure model

In this study, we develop a methodology to estimate monthly variations in degree-1 andC₂₀ coefficients by combing Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data withoceanic mass anomalies (combination approach).With respect to the method by Swenson et al.,the proposed approach exploits noise covariance information of both...

Planning of public housing in modern Tianjin (1928–1945)

European, American, and Japanese debates on public housing served as models for those in modern China, and Chinese scholars and professionals, with the support of the KMT (Kuomintang), developed public housing as a sign of innovation in both societal reform and building typology. Using the under-researched case of Tianjin's public housing...

Impacts of problem scale and sampling strategy on surrogate model accuracy: An application of surrogate-based optimization in building design

Surrogate-based Optimization is a useful approach when the objective function is computationally expensive to evaluate, compared to Simulation-based Optimization. In the surrogate-based method, analytically tractable “surrogate models” (also known as “Response Surface Models — RSMs” or “metamodels”), are constructed and validated for each...