Limb symmetry index in competitive alpine ski racers:Reference values and injury risk identification according to age-related performance levels

Purpose： The aims of this study were to assess differences of limb symmetry index （LSI） in strength- and coordination-related tasks between high-level, competitive, noninjured ski racers of different age-related performance levels and to prospectively assess limb differences as a possible risk factor for traumatic and overuse injury in youth ski racers. Methods： The study （Study 1） included 285 high-level competitive ski racers （125 females, 160 males） of 3 age-related performance levels and based on the school system： 95 youth （10-14 years, secondary modem school）, 107 adolescent （15-19 years, grammar school）, and 83 elite athletes （20-34 years）. To investigate the second aim （Study 2）, 67 of the 95 youth athletes were included and any traumatic or overuse injuries were prospectively recorded over 2 seasons. All athletes performed 4 unilateral tests （strength related： one-leg counter movement jump （OL-CMJ） and one-leg isometric/isokinetic press strength test （OL-ILS）; coordination related： one-leg stability test （OL-ST） and one-leg speedy jump test （OL-SJ））. The LSI was calculated by dividing the dominant leg by the nondominant leg and multiplying by 100. Kruskal-Wallis H tests and binary logistic regression analyses were conducted. Results： There were significant differences between the LSI of the 3 age-related performance-level groups only in the strength-related tests： the OL-CMJ （X^2（2, 285） = 9.09; p = 0.01） and the OL-ILS （X^2（2,285） = 14.79; p 〈 0.01）. The LSI for OL-ILS was found to be a significant risk factor for traumatic injury in youth ski racers （Wald = 7.08; p 〈 0.01）. No significant risk factors were found for overuse injuries. Conclusion： Younger athletes display slightly greater LSI values only in the strength-related tests. The cut-off value of limb differences of 〈 10% for return to sport decisions seems to be appropriate for elite athletes, but for youth and adolescent athletes it has to be critically discussed. It seems to be necessary to define thresholds based on specific performance tasks （strength vs. coordination related） rather than on generalizations, and age-related performance levels must be considered. Limb differences in unilateral leg extension strength represent a significant injury risk factor in youth ski racers.2018 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Shanghai University of Sport. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license. （http：//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/）.

Simplified stiffness-based approach for seismic performance evaluation of moment-resisting frame

Based on the concept of stiffness degradation, a damage index of the whole frame and the storey is proposed for the frame seismic performance evaluation. The index is compatible with the non-linear static analysis （e. g. the pushover analysis）, and the structural damage is considered via plastic hinges. Simultaneously, a practical approach is developed to obtain the relationships between the proposed index and earthquake intensities based on the capacity spectrum method. The proposed index is then illustrated through two low-rise reinforced concrete frames, and it is also compared with some other indices. The results indicate that the proposed index is on the safe side and not sensitive to the lateral load pattern. The storey index is helpful to reflect the storey damage and to uncover the position of the weak storey. Finally, the relationship between performance levels and damage index values is also proposed through statistical analysis for the performance-based seismic evaluation.

Probability-Based Seismic Performance Evaluation for Buildings

Recent developments in earthquake engineering indicate that probabilistic seismic risk analysis (PSRA) is becoming increasingly useful for the evaluation of structural per-formance in accordance with building codes. In recent years, the field of seismic resis-tance design has been undergoing a critical shift in focus from strength to performance. However, current earthquake resistant design procedures do not relate building performance to probability. A lack of sufficient empirical data has highlighted gaps in this research. This study integrated results from the analysis of structural fragility and seismic hazard in Taiwan to perform PSRA to examine the effectiveness of building code in mitigating the risks associated with earthquakes. Factors taken into account included the effect of construction materials, building height, and building age. The results of this study show that the probability of exceeding damage associated with the CP level in buildings of light steel, pre-cast concrete, and masonry, exceeds 2%. These buildings fail to meet the performance objectives outlined in FEMA-273.

Numerical Simulations of the Performance of Steel Guardrails Under Vehicle Impact

Road side barriers are constructed to protect passengers and contain vehicles when a vehicle crashes into a barrier. In general, full-scale crash testing needs to be carried out if a geometrically and structurally equivalent barrier has not previously been proven to meet the requirements of containing the vehicle and dissipating sufficient impact energy for passenger protection. As full-scale crash testing is very expensive, the number of data that can be measured in a test is usually limited, and it may not always be possible to obtain good quality measurements in such a test, a reliable and efficient numerical simulation of crash testing is therefore very useful. This paper presents finite element simulations of a 3-rail steel road traffic barrier under vehicle impact. The performance levels defined in Australian Standards AS5100 Clause 10.5 for these barriers are checked. The numerical simulations show that the barrier is able to meet low performance levels. However, the maximum deceleration is higher than the acceptable limit for passenger protection. If present, a kerb launches the vehicles into the barrier, allowing for the possibility of overriding the barrier under certain circumstances, but it redirects the vehicle and reduces the incident angle, which reduces impact force on the barrier. Further investigation into all common kerb profiles on roads should be carried out, as only one kerb profile is investigated in this study.

Seismic fragility analysis of composite frame structure based on performance

Steel-concrete composite structures that share the advantages of both steel structure and concrete structure have been developed rapidly and used widely. It has been a popular structure in high-rise buildings in recent years. Although more and more composite structures have been used in earthquake area, only a few literatures about fragility analysis of this type of structure are available. In this paper, a fragility analysis method based on performance is proposed, in which both the uncertainty due to variability in structures and ground motion are considered. Seismic fragility analysis is performed for a 15-story composite beam-concrete-filled square steel tube column frame by the proposed method. The top-drift-angle and the story-drift-angle are used as quantitative indexes to define the four different performance levels. Then seismic demand probability analysis is carried out and fragility curves are derived to assess the seismic performance of this type of structure.

Experimental analysis on adjusting performance of vapor-liquid two-phase flow controller

The vapor-liquid self-adjusting controller is an innovative automatic regulating valve.In order to ensure adjusted objects run safely and economically,the controller automatically adjusts the liquid flux to keep liquid level at a required level according to physical properties of vapor-liquid two-phase fluid.The adjusting mechanics,the controller’s performance and influencing factors of its stability have been analyzed in this paper.The theoretical analysis and successful applications have demonstrated this controller can keep the liquid level steady with good performance.The actual application in industry has shown that the controller can satisfactorily meet the requirement of industrial production and has wide application areas.

Performance Based Seismic Design of Reinforced Concrete Building

In past two decades earthquake disasters in the world have shown that significant damage occurred even when the buildings were designed as per the conventional earthquake-resistant design philosophy (force-based approach) exposing the inability of the codes to ensure minimum performance of the structures under design earthquake. The performance based seismic design (PBSD), evaluates how the buildings are likely to perform under a design earthquake. As compared to force-based approach, PBSD provides a methodology for assessing the seismic performance of a building, ensuring life safety and minimum economic losses. The non-linear static procedures also known as pushover analysis are used to analyze the performance of structure under lateral loads. Pushover analysis gives pattern of the plastic hinge formations in structural members along with other structural parameters which directly show the performance of member after an earthquake event. In this paper, a four-storey RC building is modelled and designed as per IS 456:2000 and analyzed for life safety performance level in SAP2000 v17. Analysis is carried out as per ATC 40 to find out storey drift, pushover curve, capacity spectrum curve, performance point and plastic hinges as per FEMA 273 in SAP2000 v17. From the analysis, it is checked that the performance level of the building is as per the assumption.

Integrated importance measure for multi-state coherent systems of k level

To verify the effectiveness of the integrated importance measure （IIM） for multi-state coherent systems of k level, the definition and physical meaning of IIM are demonstrated. Then, the improvement potential and Δ-importance measures are generalized to multi-state coherent systems based on the system performance level, and the relationships between IIM and traditional importance measures are discussed. The characteristics of IIM are demonstrated in both series and parallel systems. Also, an application to an oil transportation system is given. The comparison results show that： （i） IIM has some useful properties that are not possessed by traditional importance measures; （ii） IIM is effective in evaluating the component role in multi-state systems when the component reliability and the failure rate are simultaneously considered.

A study on the seismic behavior of a retrofitted building based on nonlinear static and dynamic analyses

This study describes the seismic performance of an existing five storey reinforced concrete building which represents the typical properties of low-rise non-ductile buildings in Turkey. The effectiveness of shear walls and the steel bracings in retrofitting the building was examined through nonlinear static and dynamic analyses. By using the nonlinear static analysis, retrofitted buildings seismic performances under lateral seismic load were compared with each other. Moreover, the performance points and response levels of the existing and retrofitting cases were determined by way of the capacity-spectrum method described in ATC-40 (1996). For the nonlinear dynamic analysis the records were selected to represent wide ranges of duration and frequency content. Considering the change in the stiffness and the energy dissipation capacities, the performance of the existing and retrofitted buildings were evaluated in terms of story drifts and damage states. It was found that each earthquake record exhibited its own peculiarities, dictated by frequency content, duration, sequence of peaks and their amplitude. The seismic performance of retrofitted buildings resulted in lower displacements and higher energy dissipation capacity depending mainly on the properties of the ground motions and the retrofitting strategies. Moreover, severe structural damage (irreparable or collapse) was observed for the existing building. However, buildings with retrofit alternatives exhibited lower damage levels changing from no damage to irreparable damage states.

Evolutionary characteristics and driving factors of carbon emission performance at the city level in China

To achieve carbon peak targets,realize carbon neutrality vision,and tackle global climate change,China must improve the carbon emission performance at the city level.Based on the carbon emission performance of 191 prefecture-level cities in China from 1997 to 2017,this paper analyses the evolution characteristics of urban carbon emission performance from three aspects:the overall spatial and temporal evolution,the differences according to both region and city size,and the differences among clusters categorized by carbon emission performance at the city level.This paper also reveals the impact of the social and economic transition on China’s carbon emission performance.The results show that:(1)The overall level of carbon emission performance of Chinese cities is low,and there is a downward trend during the study period.The differences in carbon emission performance among cities are convergent,but there is a wide gap between high and low values.(2)The carbon emission performance of cities in eastern coastal areas is higher than that in non-coastal areas cities.Large urban agglomerations and economically developed regions,such as provincial capitals,are the agglomeration areas of high urban carbon emission performance values.(3)The carbon emission performance level of cities with similar sizes will converge.At the same time,such changes will enhance the differences among carbon emission performances at the city level within the same region.(4)Cities that belong to high urban carbon emission performance clusters are mainly distributed in the eastern region.Such cities are classified into large cities,supercities,and megacities.Compared with low urban carbon emission performance clusters,cities in high urban carbon emission performance clusters show a higher proportion in the medium-high level and high level of carbon emission performance.Moreover,cities in high urban carbon emission performance clusters are more likely to improve their urban carbon emission performance.(5)The economic agglomeration effect,industrial structure adjustment and carbon intensity reduction have a significant impact on improving urban carbon emission performance.Population agglomeration has an incremental effect,and the anticipated benefits of environmental regulation have yet to be fully realized.The impacts of different clusters and different regions are variable.Finally,this paper advances policy enlightenment according to its research findings.

Method for rating energy performance of public buildings

This paper discussed a comparative study of several state-of-art methods for determining building energy consumption benchmark. A new approach, which combined the idea of ＂building benchmark＂ and ＂operational benchmark＂ in its rating system, was proposed. A case study was conducted which applied the proposed approach to benchmarking an existing office building in Tianjin. Besides, the calculation of benchmarks of the reference building model and real building model using the rating method in eQUEST was also considered. Furthermore, the simulation results of the reference building model were taken as the baseline to divide real office buildings into different energy performance grades.

Improving iris recognition performance via multi-instance fusion at the score level

Fusion of multiple instances within a modality for biometric verification performance improvement has received considerable attention. In this letter, we present an iris recognition method based on multiinstance fusion, which combines the left and right irises of an individual at the matching score level. When fusing, a novel fusion strategy using minimax probability machine （MPM） is applied to generate a fused score for the final decision. The experimental results on CASIA and UBIRIS databases show that the proposed method can bring obvious performance improvement compared with the single-instance method. The comparison among different fusion strategies demonstrates the superiority of the fusion strategy based on MPM.

Effect of eccentricity in reinforced concrete beam-column-slab connection under cyclic loading

Beam-column connections are one of the most critical elements of reinforced concrete structures,especially in seismically active regions,and have been extensively evaluated experimentally and numerically.However,very limited experimental studies about eccentric reinforced concrete connections including the effect of connected slabs are available.This study presents the experimental results of two half-scale eccentric beam-column-slab connections subjected to quasi-static cyclic loading.The horizontal eccentricity(eh)is maintained at 12.5%and 25%of column width(bc)for specimens 1 and 2,respectively.The damage pattern,performance levels,displacement ductility(μD),energy dissipation,and connection strength and stiffness are compared for both specimens,and the effect of eccentricity is evaluated.It is concluded that the eccentricity has no significant effect on the lateral load carrying capacity;however,the overall strength degradation increases with the increase in eccentricity.Similarly,the elastic stiffness of specimen 2 decreased by 14%as the eccentricity increased from 12.5%to 25%;however,the eccentricity had no significant effect on the overall stiffness degradation.μD decreased by 43%,and the energy dissipation capacity decreased by 40%in specimen 2 with higher eccentricity.The story drifts corresponding to the performance levels of the life safety(LS)and collapse prevention(CP)were found to be 28%lesser in specimen 2 than in specimen 1.