The coupling effect of initial shear stress and thermal cycles on the thermomechanical behaviour of clay concrete and sand-concrete interfaces has been studied. A set of drained monotonic direct shear tests was conducted at the soil-concrete interface level. Samples were initially sheared to half of the material's shear strength and then they were subjected to five heating/cooling cycles before being sheared to failure. The test results showed that the effect of thermal cycles on the shear strength of the materials was negligible, yet shear displacement occurred during application of thermal cycles without an increase in shear stress, confirming the coupling between the shear stress and temperature. In addition, a slight increase of stiffness due to the coupling was observed which diminished with further shearing. ... Read more

This paper describes several geodetic studies that consolidate the reliability and precision of monitoring subsidence due to hydrocarbon production: the deployment of Integrated Geodetic Reference Stations (IGRS); the application of high resolution InSAR; the comparison of different GNSS processing methodologies; the implementation of an efficient InSAR stochastic model, and the framework of integrated geodetic processing (levelling, GNSS, InSAR). The advances that have been made are applicable for any other subsidence monitoring project. ... Read more

The Hermite radial basis functions (HRBFs) implicits have been used to reconstruct surfaces from scattered Hermite data points. In this work, we propose a closed-form formulation to construct HRBF-based implicits by a quasi-solution to approximate the exact one. A scheme is developed to automatically adjust the support sizes of basis functions to hold the error bound of a quasi-solution. Our method can generate an implicit function from positions and normals of scattered points without taking any global operation. Robust and efficient reconstructions are observed in our experimental tests on real data captured from a variety of scenes. ... Read more