A study of stone arch bridge’s flood reliability through a surrogate model approach

Europe’s historic masonry arch bridges are culturally and economically significant, but their long-term safety must be ensured. Scour effects are the most common cause of collapse, so it is necessary to carry out structural assessments to mitigate the risk and prevent potential failures. In this study, a metamodel-based method was used to...

Uncertainties in the Synthetic Data Generation for the Creation of Bridge Digital Twins

Digital twins (DTs) are virtual replicas of physical assets that can be used to monitor and manage their performance. To date, the DT concept has been effectively implemented in various industries, including aeronautics, manufacturing, medicine, and more recently, in the architecture, engineering, and construction sector. In the latter, these...

Composite Power System Reliability with Renewables and Customer Flexibility

Composite Power System Reliability is defined as the computational procedure that quantifies the probability that the power system will perform the function of delivering electric power to customers adequately, on a continuous basis and with an acceptable quality. This definition leaves many details undefined and exemplifies the ambiguity in...

Partitioning the Uncertainty of Ensemble Projections of Global Glacier Mass Change

Glacier mass loss is recognized as a major contributor to current sea level rise. However, large uncertainties remain in projections of glacier mass loss on global and regional scales. We present an ensemble of 288 glacier mass and area change projections for the 21st century based on 11 glacier models using up to 10 general circulation...

Fast terminal sliding mode tracking control of nonlinear uncertain mass–spring system with experimental verifications

In this article, a fast terminal sliding mode control technique is used for robust tracking control of a nonlinear uncertain mass–spring system in the existence of external perturbation. This system is considered as a benchmark problem in the flexible joint mechanisms. The joints flexibility in the robotic systems creates one of the most...

Measurement of sewer sediments with acoustic technology: From laboratory to field experiments

Monitoring sewer sediments is necessary to better understand sedimentation and erosion processes. Sonar is one of the available techniques to proceed to sewer sediment measurements. Extraction of numerical data, implementation of a new algorithm to identify the water-sediment interface, laboratory and field experiments have been done to...

Dealing with Uncertainties in Fresh Water Supply: Experiences in the Netherlands

Developing fresh water supply strategies for the long term needs to take into account the fact that the future is deeply uncertain. Not only the extent of climate change and the extent and nature of its impacts are unknown, also socio-economic conditions may change in unpredictable ways, as well as social preferences. Often, it is not possible...

Uncertainties Analysis and Life Cycle Costs of Piping Mitigation Measures

The traditional Dutch way to deal with piping failure in river dikes is the implementation of piping berms. The disadvantage of such a measure is the required inland space. Relief wells, on the other hand, require less or no inland space representing an attractive alternative solution. The aims of this paper are first, to show how reliability...

Assimilating aircraft-based measurements to improve forecast accuracy of volcanic ash transport

The 2010 Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption had serious consequences to civil aviation. This has initiated a lot of research on volcanic ash transport forecast in recent years. For forecasting the volcanic ash transport after eruption onset, a volcanic ash transport and diffusion model (VATDM) needs to be run with Eruption Source Parameters (ESP)...

On the Generic Utilization of Probabilistic Methods for Quantification of Uncertainty in Process-based Morhpodynamic Model Applications

A variety of uncertainty sources are inherent in process-based morphodynamic modelling applications. There is an increasing demand for the quantification of these uncertainties. This contribution introduces a probabilistic-morphodynamic (PM) modelling framework that enables this quantification. The PM modelling framework provides a systematic...

Uncertainties in different level assessments of domestic ventilation systems

In order to improve the quality of ventilation systems, assessments are widely used. In this paper, 3 main assessment levels are distinguished based on the number of ventilation systems to be assessed and the assessment objective. The main assessment levels distinguished in this paper are global level (the assessment concerns a set of...

Performance of Counter Flow Heat Recovery Ventilation Systems in Dwellings Considering the Influence of Uncertainties

Both critical and optimistic claims have been made regarding the performance of heat recovery ventilation systems (HRVS) in dwellings. Such arguments are raised partly because two key aspects are not fully clarified, i.e. the performance criteria and the influence of uncertainties. In the current paper, an assessment method for HRVS considering...

Method to assess the performance of ventilation systems in dwellings considering the influence of uncertainties

Normally, the design of a ventilation system in a dwelling is based on national regulations, related design rules, building tradition and general knowledge about healthy indoor air quality, ventilation and air handling units. In practice, the actual performance of ventilation systems is determined by ventilation components, building properties,...

Safety standards of flood defenses

Current design codes like the Eurocode use safety or reliability classes to assign target reliabilities to different types of structures or structural members according to the potential consequences of failure. That, in essence, is a risk-based criterion. A wide range of structures is designed with such codes, and distinction is made between...

A Factor of Safety for Geotechnical Characterization