The Safety Level Of Concrete Pile Foundations Under Industrial Monuments

Prefabricated concrete piles have been used for the foundation of bigger buildings for about a century. Often a change in function, an addition (also vertically) or another type of alteration is required, resulting in different loads on the foundation. There are several complicating factors that return regularly in these assessments. The first...

Monitoring Deformations Of A Wooden Church Tower By Laser Scanning

Churches are part of heritage structures that take an important role in Europe ́s cultural identity. As such, these structures must be protected to prevent catastrophic collapse and any damage must be reported timely to establish planning to maintenance and restoration. This can be achievable when the churches are monitored periodically with...

Decay Patterns And Damage Processes Of Historic Concrete: A Survey In The Netherlands

Historic concrete buildings (end of 19th century – 1960s), because of their “experimental” character, require a specific approach to both survey and conservation. Although they were built with empirical approaches, some buildings show a fair state of conservation and resilience –even though they have already exceeded the 100-year threshold–...

Seismic Assessment Of Dutch Urm Buildings According To Npr9998:2018 Code With An Equivalent-Frame Approach

In the last two decades, the province of Groningen, located in the North-East of the Netherlands, has been subjected to an increasing number of earthquakes induced by gas extractions. The existing building stock is mainly composed by unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings not conceived to resist seismic loads. The need of reducing the...

Integrated Conservation Strategies In The Netherlands

In the Netherlands a program for the enhancement of quality in the restoration of monumental buildings is presently carried out, stimulated by national authorities and coordinated by the foundation ERM. Guidelines are issued by the branches involved, from architects to masons, under guidance of an experts’ committee, to perform interventions on...

Development Of A Neural Network Embedding For Quantifying Crack Pattern Similarity In Masonry Structures

The degree of similarity between damage patterns often correlates with the likelihood of having similar damage causes. Therefore, deciding whether crack patterns are similar is one of the key steps in assessing the conditions of masonry structures. To our knowledge, no literature has been published regarding masonry crack pattern similarity...

Numerical Study Of Pier-Wall Connections In Typical Dutch Urm Buildings

In recent years, the seismic risk in the north of the Netherlands has increased due to gas extraction. Since 2014, the Delft University of Technology started a research program to assess the seismic response of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings. The Dutch URM buildings are characterized by slender piers and transverse walls. In common...

Performance of unreinforced masonry strengthened with bed joint reinforced repointing

Bed joint reinforced repointing is a strengthening method often used in the Netherlands to counteract settlement damage. This strengthening technique consists of cutting a slot in the mortar joint and installing twisted steel bars embedded in a high-strength repair mortar. Due to the increase in seismic activities, triggered by gas extraction in...

Fill-In-Glass Restoration: Exploring Issues Of Compatibility For The Case Of Schaesberg Castle

This paper explores a novel restoration approach for consolidating historic structures using structural glass to substitute for the missing elements, preserving at the same time the structural integrity of the structure. A restoration design is proposed for the hypothetical consolidation of the remaining tower of Schaesberg Castle, in Limburg,...

FDBB: Fluid dynamics building blocks

High-performance computing platforms are becoming more and more heterogeneous, which makes it very difficult for researchers and scientific software developers to keep up with the rapid changes on the hardware market. In this paper, the open-source project FDBB (Fluid Dynamics Building Blocks) is presented, which eases the development of...

A high order hybrid mimetic discretization on curvilinear quadrilateral meshes for complex geometries

In this paper, we present a hybrid mimetic method which solves the mixed formulation of the Poisson problem on curvilinear quadrilateral meshes. The method is hybrid in the sense that the domain is decomposed into multiple disjoint elements and the interelement continuity is enforced using a Lagrange multiplier. The method is mimetic in the...

Taylor least squares reconstruction technique for material point methods

The material point method (MPM) is an effective computational tool for simulating problems involving large deformations. However, its direct mapping of the material-point data to the background grid frequently leads to severe inaccuracies. The standard function reconstruction techniques can considerably decrease these errors, but do not...

Spline-based meshing techniques for industrial applications

Isogeometric Analysis (IgA) has become an accepted framework for the mod-elling, simulation and optimization (MSO) of engineering processes. However, the fully automatized generation of analysis-suitable parameterizations of geometries as they arise in practical workflows is still a challenging task, which often requires application-specific...

Symbolic regression of algebraic stress-strain relation for RANS turbulence closure

In this work recent advancements are presented in utilising deterministic symbolic regression to infer algebraic models for turbulent stress-strain relation with sparsity-promoting regression techniques. The goal is to build a functional expression from a set of candidate functions in order to represent the target data most accurately....

Investigation of the gap vortex street in densely packed tube arrays in axial flow using CFD and experiments

Axial flow in tube bundles with small pitch-to-diameter ratio, a geometry encountered in nuclear reactor cores and heat exchangers, often displays periodic fluctuations. A significant velocity discrepancy between the inter-cylinder gap and subchannel center originates from the difference in through-flow area, feeding an instability. As it is...