Ductility demands on buckling-restrained braced frames under earthquake loading

Accurate estimates of ductility demands on buckling-restrained braced frames(BRBFs)are crucial to performance-based design of BRBFs.An analytical study on the seismic behavior of BRBFs has been conducted at the ATLSS Center,Lehigh University to prepare for an upcoming experimental program.The analysis program DRAIN-2DX was used to model a one-bay,four-story prototype BRBF including material and geometric nonlinearities.The buckling- restrained brace(BRB)model incorporates both isotropic and kinematic hardening.Nonlinear static pushover and time- history analyses were performed on the prototype BRBF.Performance objectives for the BRBs were defined and used to evaluate the time-history analysis results.Particular emphasis was placed on global ductility demands and ductility demands on the BRBs.These demands were compared with anticipated ductility capacities.The analysis results,along with results from similar previous studies,are used to evaluate the BRBF design provisions that have been recommended for codification in the United States.The results show that BRB maximum ductility demands can be as high as 20 to 25.These demands significantly exceed those anticipated by the BRBF recommended provisions.Results from the static pushover and time- history analyses are used to demonstrate why the ductility demands exceed those anticipated by the recommended provisions. The BRB qualification testing protocol contained in the BRBF recommended provisions is shown to be inadequate because it requires only a maximum ductility demand of at most 7.5.Modifications to the testing protocol are recommended.

STUDY ON SEMANTIC-BASED VIDEO WATERMARKING METHOD

A new video watermarking method for the Audio Video coding Standard (AVS) is proposed. According to human visual masking properties, this method determines the region of interest for watermark embedding by analyzing video semantics, and generates dynamic robust watermark according to video motion semantics, and embeds watermarks in the Intermediate Frequency (IF) Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of the luminance sub-block prediction residual in the region of interest. This method controls watermark embedding strength adaptively by video textures semantics. Ex- periments show that this method is robust not only to various conventional attacks, but also to re-frame, frame cropping, frame deletion and other video-specific attacks.

Review of AVS Audio Coding Standard

Audio Video Coding Standard （AVS） is a second-generation source coding standard and the first standard for audio and video coding in China with independent intellectual property rights. Its performance has reached the international standard. Its coding efficiency is 2 to 3 times greater than that of MPEG -2. This technical solution is more simple, and it can greatly save channel resource. After more than ten years＇ development, AVS has achieved great success. The latest version of the AVS audio coding standard is ongoing and mainly aims at the increasing demand for low bitrate and high quality audio services. The paper reviews the history and recent development of AVS audio coding standard in terms of basic features, key techniques and performance. Finally, the future development of AVS audio coding standard is discussed.

Sieving Error from Dry-Separating Silt-Sand-Gravel Soils

The dry-separation method is an alternative to the wet-preparation in the current European Standard for the determination of particle size distributions by the sieving of soils. Due to the risk of error, dry-separation is cautioned against in the standard;however, there is no additional guidance as to when it is unsuitable nor for the magnitude of error that it may introduce. This study investigates the dry-separation method as an alternative by comparing with the conventional method of Wet-preparation in terms of particle-size distributions of eight cohesionless sand-gravel soils with varying amounts of nonplastic fines. The findings indicate a gradually increasing sieving error for fractions at minus 0.5 mm with the amount of fines in the soil, and depending on the fines content of the soil, dry-separation introduced errors upwards of 45% in silt-sand-gravel soils. An empirical best-fit formula is proposed for the estimation of the error using the dry-preparation method on this type of soil. Furthermore, to avoid sieving errors, the results suggest that the dry-separation method should not be used for silt-sand-gravel soils exceeding 2% silt size fractions.

Basic Considerations on AVS DRM Architecture

Digital Rights Management （DRM） is an important infrastructure for the digital media age. It is a part of the AVS （Audio and Video coding Standard） of China. AVS Trusted Decoder （ATD） that plays back digital media program according to rights conditions is the core of AVS DRM architecture. Adaptation layers axe responsible for translating or negotiating between ATD and peripheral systems. The Packaging Adaptation Layer （PAL）, Licensing Adaptation Layer （LAL） and Rendering Adaptation Layer （RAL） will help ATD to gain the interoperability in various DRM environments.