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The utilization of seismic barriers for protection against the hazardous impact of natural or technogenic waves is an extremely promising emerging technology to secure buildings, structures and entire areas against earthquake-generated seismic waves, high-speed-transport-induced vibrations, etc. The current research is targeted at studying the effect of seismic-barrier shape on the reduction of seismic-wave magnitudes within the protected region. The analytical solution of Lamb's problem was used to verify the adopted numerical approach. It was demonstrated that the addition of complementary geometric features to a simple barrier shape provides the possibility of significantly increasing the resulting seismic protection. A simple genetic algorithm was employed to evaluate the nontrivial but extremely effective geometry of the seismic barrier. The developed approach can be used in various problems requiring optimization of non-parameterizable geometric shapes. The applicability of genetic algorithms and other generative algorithms to discover optimal (or close to optimal) geometric configurations for the essentially multiscale problems of the interaction of mechanical waves with inclusions is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the microstructural evolution and grain refinement kinetics of a solution-treated Cu-0.1Cr-0.06Zr alloy during equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) at a temperature of 673 K via route BC. The microstructural change during plastic deformation was accompanied by the formation of the microband and an increase in the misorientations of strain-induced subboundaries. We argue that continuous dynamic recrystallization refined the initially coarse grains and discuss the dynamic recrystallization kinetics in terms of grain/subgrain boundary triple junction evolution. A modified Johnson-Mehl-Avrami-Kolmogorov relationship with a strain exponent of about 1.49 is used to express the strain dependence of the triple junctions of high-angle boundaries. Severe plastic deformation by ECAP led to substantial strengthening of the Cu-0.1Cr-0.06Zr alloy. The yield strength increased from 60 MPa in the initial state to 445 MPa after a total strain level of 12. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]