Fatigue behaviour of welded joints assembled by longitudinal corrugated plates

Fatigue is usually the cause for the cracks identified at bridge elements in service. With an increase in the introduction of corrugated steel web girders in recent highway bridge construction, the understanding of the fatigue behaviour of welded details in such structures becomes an important issue for the design. The typical welded details were represented as welded joints assembled by longitudinal corrugated plates. All the experiments were performed under fatigue loading using a servo-control testing machine. The test results from the failure mode observation with the aid of infrared thermo-graph technology show that the failure manner of these welded joints is comparable to that of the corrugated steel web beams reported previously. It is indicated from the stiffness degradation analysis that the welded joints with larger corrugation angle have higher stiffness and greater stiffness degradation in the notable stiffness degradation range. It is shown from the test S-N relations based on the free regression and forced regression analyses that there is a good linear dependence between lg(N) and lg(ΔS). It is also demonstrated that the proposed fracture mechanics analytical model is able to give a prediction slightly lower but on the safe side for the mean stresses at 2 million cycles of the test welded joints.

Injury severity analysis： comparison of multilevel logistic regression models and effects of collision data aggregation

This paper describes an empirical study aiming at identifying the main differences between different logistic regression models and collision data aggregation methods that are commonly applied in road safety literature for modeling collision severity. In particular, the research compares three popular multilevel logistic models （i.e., sequential binary logit models, ordered logit models, and multinomial logit models） as well as three data aggregation methods （i.e., occupant based, vehicle based, and collision based）. Six years of collision data （2001-2006） from 31 highway routes from across the province of Ontario, Canada were used for this analysis. It was found that a multilevel multinomial logit model has the best fit to the data than the other two models while the results obtained from occupant-based data are more reliable than those from vehicle- and collision-based data. More importantly, while generally consistent in terms of factors that were found to be significant between different models and data aggregation methods, the effect size of each factor differ sub- stantially, which could have significant implications forevaluating the effects of different safety-related policies and countermeasures.

Anti-plane deformations around arbitrary-shaped canyons on a wedge-shape half-space:moment method solutions

The wave propagation behavior in an elastic wedge-shaped medium with an arbitrary shaped cylindrical canyon at its vertex has been studied.Numerical computation of the wave displacement field is carried out on and near the canyon surfaces using weighted-residuals(moment method).The wave displacement fields are computed by the residual method for the cases of elliptic,circular,rounded-rectangular and flat-elliptic canyons,The analysis demonstrates that the resulting surface displacement depends,as in similar previous analyses,on several factors including,but not limited,to the angle of the wedge,the geometry of the vertex,the frequencies of the incident waves,the angles of incidence,and the material properties of the media.The analysis provides intriguing results that help to explain geophysical observations regarding the amplification of seismic energy as a function of site conditions.