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Precast technology is increasingly favoured by bridge engineers, and the seismic performance of precast bridge piers urgently needs to be addressed. Precast piers have a complex load-bearing mechanism, and their design method has not been clearly determined. Fibre plastic hinge theory can satisfactorily analyse the seismic performance of precast piers. In this study, the seismic performance of precast piers is analysed through numerical simulation of pier columns based on the pseudostatic testing of a set of existing precast piers and combined with fibre plastic hinge theory. The results show the following: With reasonable constructional measures, precast piers connected by grouted sleeves indeed have seismic performance similar to that of cast-in-place components. Finite-element programs can be employed to simulate the mechanical properties of steel rebars before yielding well but not those after yielding or under fatigue. When fibre plastic hinges are used for finite-element analysis, if the fibre cross-section is reasonably divided, the length of the plastic hinge has little influence on the results; otherwise, too densely distributed plastic hinges may lead to nonconvergence of the results in a later working condition. The plastic hinge method recommended in this paper, especially the sectional fibre-cross-section division method, can obtain the plastic hinge performance state, it can help save the test cost and make up for the shortage of test data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel chaotic new three-dimensional system has been studied by Zhang et al. in 2012. In the system, there are three control parameters and three different nonlinear terms which governed equations. Zhang et al. studied elementary (preliminary) dynamic properties of the chaotic new three-dimensional system by means of bifurcation diagram, maximum Lyapunov exponent, phase portraits, dynamics behaviors by changing some parameters etc., using all possible theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. In this paper, we have demonstrated its complete synchronization. The proposed results are verified by numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, chaotic synchronization with uncertainties and disturbances is studied. Firstly, a new control method based on UDE control is proposed, which is composed of two controllers: one is the stabilization controller in order to realize the stabilization of nominal system without uncertainties and disturbances and the other is the UDE controller in order to deal with the given controlled system with both uncertainties and disturbances. Then, two examples are studied by the above method. Finally, the correctness and effectiveness of the method are verified by numerical simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are important and useful tool platforms in exploring and utilizing ocean resource. However, the effect of control surfaces would decrease even invalid complete in this condition, and it is very hard for conventional AUVs to perform detailed missions at a low forward speed. Therefore, solving this problem of AUVs becomes particularly important to increase the application scope of AUVs. In this paper, we present a design scheme for the vectored thruster AUV based on 3RPS parallel manipulator, which is a kind of parallel manipulator and has advantages of compact structure and reliable performance. To study the performance and characteristics of the proposed thrust-vectoring mechanism, a series of works about corresponding kinematic and dynamic analysis have been performed through the theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. In the part of kinematics, the inverse, forward kinematics, and workspace analysis of the thrust-vectoring mechanism is presented, and the numerical simulations are accomplished to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of this design in AUVs. In order to further verify feasibility of the thrust-vectoring mechanism, based on the considerations of various affecting factors, a dynamic model of the designed thrust-vectoring mechanism is established according to theoretical analysis, and the driving forces of the linear actuator are presented through a series of numerical simulations. In addition, a control scheme based on PID algorithm is proposed for the designed vectored thruster with considering various affecting factors and the application environment. Meanwhile, the control scheme is also established and verified in MATLAB Simscape Mutibody. A series of numerical simulations of the thrust-vectoring mechanism prove the feasibility of the vectored thruster. According to equipping the designed vectored thruster, the AUVs can overcome the limit of weakening the control ability at zero or low forward speeds, and this improvement also expands the application of it, which has been scaled greatly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, dynamical behaviors of fraction-order Hopfield neuron network are investigated. Firstly, Mittag-Leffler stability analysis is carried out and some sufficient conditions are obtained. On the basis of theoretical analysis, two criteria for determining the stability of fraction-order Hopfield neuron network are presented and comparison between them is given by theoretical analysis along with numerical simulation. According to the proposed criteria, by selecting suitable system parameters, it can be obtained that fraction-order Hopfield neuron network can stabilize to the equilibrium point or an attractor, which can be a periodic orbit or two points. Secondly, considering the inevitable noise in the complex environment of neuron network, the effect of noise on the dynamics of fraction-order Hopfield neuron network is discussed via calculating coefficient of variation and numerical simulations. Results suggest that random noise can cause coherence resonance in fraction-order Hopfield neuron network for certain noise intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a discriminant problem of location-scale family in case of prediction from type II censored samples. Three model selection approaches and two types of predictors are, respectively, proposed to predict the future order statistics from censored data when the best underlying distribution is not clear with several candidates. Two members in the location-scale family, the normal distribution and smallest extreme value distribution, are used as candidates to illustrate the best model competition for the underlying distribution via using the proposed prediction methods. The performance of correct and incorrect selections under correct specification and misspecification is evaluated via using Monte Carlo simulations. Simulation results show that model misspecification has impact on the prediction precision and the proposed three model selection approaches perform well when more than one candidate distributions are competing for the best underlying distribution. Finally, the proposed approaches are applied to three data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the application of range-free localization technology for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), an improved localization algorithm based on iterative centroid estimation is proposed in this paper. With this methodology, the centroid coordinate of the space enclosed by connected anchor nodes and the received signal strength indication (RSSI) between the unknown node and the centroid are calculated. Then, the centroid is used as a virtual anchor node. It is proven that there is at least one connected anchor node whose distance from the unknown node must be farther than the virtual anchor node. Hence, in order to reduce the space enclosed by connected anchor nodes and improve the location precision, the anchor node with the weakest RSSI is replaced by this virtual anchor node. By applying this procedure repeatedly, the localization algorithm can achieve a good accuracy. Observing from the simulation results, the proposed algorithm has strong robustness and can achieve an ideal performance of localization precision and coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When analyzing mechanical systems with numerical simulation by the Udwadia and Kalaba method, numerical integral results of dynamic equations will gradually deviate from requirements of constraint equations and eventually lead to constraint violation. It is a common method to solve the constraint violation by using constraint stability to modify the constraint equation. Selection of stability parameters is critical in the particular form of the corrected equation. In this paper, the method of selecting and determining of stability parameters is given, and these parameters will be used to correct the Udwadia-Kalaba basic equation by the Baumgarte constraint stability method. The selection domain of stability parameters is further reduced in view of the singularity of the constraint matrix during the integration procedure based on the selection domain which is obtained by the system stability analysis method. Errors of velocity violation and position violation are defined in the workspace, so as to determine the parameter values. Finally, the 3-link spatial manipulator is used to verify stability parameters of the proposed method. Numerical simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of the calculation of the longitudinal location of a wheel rail contact point on the wheelset’s motion in a vehicle dynamic simulation. All current vehicle dynamic software programs assume that the contact between wheel and rail takes place in the vertical plane through the wheelset’s rolling axis. However, when the yaw angle of the wheelset is nonzero, the contact point is situated up to 10 mm from that plane. This difference causes a difference in the yaw moment on the wheelset which is used in the vehicle dynamic simulation. To such an end, an existing analytical method to determine the longitudinal method was validated using a numerical approach. Then vehicle dynamic simulations with both the classic and the new contact location were performed, concluding that using a more accurate contact point location results in a smaller wheelset yaw angle in a vehicle dynamic simulation, although the effect is small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Euler-Taylor-Galerkin flux-corrected transport (ETG-FCT) algorithm for the numerical solution of particle transport equations is described, based on the method developed by Lohner to solve conservation equations in fluid mechanics, and its application is extended to gas discharge problems. To improve the efficiency of computing and reduce numerical error, the nonuniform triangular mesh method is introduced, and the continuity equation is solved by ETG-FCT. The new contributions in this paper include the development of the ETG scheme and its application to rod-plate gap streamer discharge in 50~50% SF6/N2 gas mixtures problems. Results are obtained: the spatial distributions of electron densities, positive ion densities, negative ion densities, photoelectron densities, and the electric field, respectively. The velocities of streamer propagations and the radius of streamer obtained from the proposed model are in good agreement with experimental and simulation results in literature. The results also prove that the ETG-FCT method is valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a co-design method of the event generator and the dynamic output feedback controller for a linear time-invariant (LIT) system. The event-triggered condition on the sensor-to-controller and the controller-to-actuator depends on the plant output and the controller output, respectively. A sufficient condition on the existence of the event generator and the dynamic output feedback controller is proposed and the co-design problem can be converted into the feasibility of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). The LTI system is asymptotically stable under the proposed event-triggered controller and also reduces the computing resources with respect to the time-triggered one. In the end, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]