Large deformation three-dimensional static analysis of deep water marine risers

The problem of static three-dimensional, nonlinear, large deformation response of a marine riser is formulated within small strain theory and solved numerically. This type of analysis is necessary, for the new generation of drilling and production risers. The mathematical model takes properly into account the effects of internal and external pressure and the complete nonlinear boundary conditions, without linearizing the follower forces. The extensibility or inextensibility condition is used as the constitutive relation in the tangential direction. Torsion and bending are coupled. The external load and the boundary conditions are deformation dependent. A solution method is developed based on an incremental finite element algorithm, which involves a prediction-correction scheme. In the correction phase deformation dependent quantities are updated. The extensibility or inextensibility condition is used to reduce the degrees of freedom of the system. The numerical results of the developed computer code compare very well with available semi-analytical and numerical solutions. Three numerical applications are used to demonstrate the importance of large deformation, nonlinear and three-dimensional analyses.     

Impact of Water Vapor on Elevation-dependent Climate Change

Elevation dependency amongst climate change signals has been found in major mountain ranges around the world, but the main factors causing this dependency have not been clarified. In this study, four different datasets of observation and reanalysis for China were used to examine the elevation dependency of climate change. A lack of consistency was found in dependency between warming magnitude and elevation across the Tibetan Plateau and China. However, a dependency of climate change on water vapor was detected whereby the temperature trend initially increased at low specific humidity, and then decreased as specific humidity increased. At ground level the maximum trend in temperature appeared in the specific humidity range 2.0-3.0 g kg^-1. This suggests that water vapor is a mediator of climate change and may be responsible for elevation-dependent climate change.     

基桩可靠度分析的统计相关性评价方法

为了评估不同失效准则对基桩可靠度的影响,传统的方法是引入失效准则偏差系数。然而目前所定义的失效准则偏差系数使得偏差系数和基本随机变量之间具有一定的相关性,直接将偏差系数的统计参数用于基桩可靠度分析是不尽合理的。为此,基于线性回归理论提出了新的失效准则偏差系数的定义,并采用Spearman秩相关系数方法检验了偏差系数和基本随机变量之间的相关性。采用算例分析了偏差系数和基本随机变量之间的相关性对基桩可靠度的影响。结果表明,传统的失效准则偏差系数的定义使得偏差系数和基本随机变量之间具有一定的相关性,提出的通用的失效准则偏差系数能够有效地消除这种相关性。偏差系数与基本随机变量之间的相关性对偏差系数的均值具有明显的影响,但对变异系数基本没有影响。此外,偏差系数与基本随机变量间的相关性对基桩可靠指标具有明显的影响,基桩可靠度分析中应该消除这种相关性。     

震区道路系统规划设计方案的量化分析

提出以最小路集,合理路集以及堵塞、失效相关程度等进行震区新建道路网络系统规划设计方案的量化评估方法,通过算例说明该方法不仅可行且便于应用。     

基于移动监测数据的不同城市场景下PM2.5浓度精细模拟与时空特征解析

城市内部PM_2.5浓度分布具有明显的空间异质性,而传统方法基于遥感数据或监测站点数据进行分析,难以揭示高时空分辨率下城市内部的PM_2.5浓度分布特征,缺少不同时刻城市场景（如：道路、工业区、住宅区等）对PM_2.5浓度复杂非线性影响的解析。本研究将移动监测传感器安装于快递车上,采集福州市主城区南部不同类型场景的PM_2.5浓度,然后融合地理加权回归（Geographical Weighted Regression, GWR）和梯度提升决策树（Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, GBDT）方法,提出一种基于GWR-GBDT的PM_2.5模拟与场景解析模型,能够较好地拟合气象、场景因素与PM_2.5浓度的非线性关系,提升了城市PM_2.5污染精细监测能力;并结合部分依赖图解析不同时段不同场景因素对PM_2.5浓度的非线性作用影响。结果表明：① 基于移动PM_2.5浓度监测数据,利用GWR-GBDT模型能够较好地模拟城市场景、气象和PM_2.5浓度之间的非线性关系,能够有效精细模拟PM_2.5浓度的空间分布,十折验证R²结果为0.52~0.94;② 通过部分依赖图分析同一场景在不同时段对PM_2.5浓度响应的异质性,发现各类场景对PM_2.5浓度提升或抑制作用并不稳定;③ 解析不同时段人类活动与城市场景对PM_2.5浓度的交互作用发现,教育医疗单位和住宅区两类场景对PM_2.5浓度的提升作用都与人类通勤有密切关系,高污染场景中的建筑工地在采取的洒水降尘措施后能在数小时内有效缓解PM_2.5污染,公园文体服务区在多数时段对PM_2.5浓度具有抑制作用,工业区和道路多数时段会致使对PM_2.5浓度提升;④ 从PM_2.5浓度的空间分布来看,福州市主城区南部PM_2.5浓度总体呈现东南高-西北低的分布趋势,建筑工地、道路和工业区场景轻度以上污染面积占比明显高于其他场景,公园场景总体PM_2.5浓度较低,山体公园傍晚会受到周边工业区的影响而导致PM_2.5浓度升高,而城市陆地外围水域对沿岸PM_2.5浓度具有抑制作用;⑤ 研究结果可为不同场景下PM_2.5污染精细化治理、城市规划以及老人、儿童等高危人群的PM_2.5污染暴露风险防范提供支持。     

Urban structures and daily mobility patterns in a city of long distances—the case of Muscat/Oman

Population growth, urban sprawl and a high degree of car dependency as well as slowly rising petrol prices contribute towards increasing challenges for everyday urban mobility in Muscat, Oman. Until now, only a few empirical studies have dealt with urban mobility in Oman. Therefore, this article draws mainly on our own empirical findings to answer the following questions: What do daily and weekly mobility patterns look like in Muscat? How do these practices differ depending on the social position of the household, i.e. their nationality, income and education? Which interdependent effects can be discerned between everyday mobility practices and the fragmented and segregated urban structures? Since our research questions focus on the interrelations between urban structures and individual mobility, we chose a mixed‐methods approach including methods derived both from social and spatial research. This article in particular draws on our quantitative survey covering 850 households and extensive mappings of three selected case study areas and secondary data analysis.     

Climate advice and extension practice

This article unpacks the problematic relationship between emerging climate change adaptation norms and changes underway in agricultural extension. It is increasingly recognised that in order to apply new knowledge about climate change in rural development practice a more institutional perspective is needed, but there is no clear consensus on what this implies. This article looks at agricultural extension as an example of a meso-level institution that is frequently assumed to be a major potential “implementing partner” in climate adaptation efforts, at the same time as it is also often portrayed as a worst-case example of the obstacles encountered in changing the focus of a path dependent bureaucracy. This article contrasts the perspectives of normative climate adaptation frameworks (exemplified by the 2011 World Resources Report) with what is known about prevailing extension trends and realities. It is suggested that long lists of recommended climate adaptation tasks and technologies may distract from an understanding of the institutional change processes underway within meso-level institutions, wherein the climate agenda would need to be merged with other agendas related to pluralistic, pragmatic, accountable, sustainable and market-oriented rural development.     

Continuum large cracking in a rate‐dependent plastic–damage model for cyclic‐loaded concrete structures

Formulation and algorithmic treatment of a rate‐dependent plastic–damage model modified to capture large tensile cracking in cyclic‐loaded concrete structures are presented in detail for a three‐dimensional implementation. The plastic–damage model proposed by Lee and Fenves in 1998 was founded based on isotropic damaged elasticity in combination with isotropic multi‐hardening plasticity to simulate cracking and crushing of concrete under cyclic or dynamic loadings. In order that the model can capture large crack opening displacements, which are inevitable in plain concrete structures, the excessive increase in plastic strain causing unrealistic results in cyclic behaviors is prevented when the tensile plastic–damage variable controlling the evolution of tensile damage is larger than a critical value. In such a condition, the crack opening/closing mechanism becomes similar to discrete cracking. The consistent tangent operator required to accelerate convergence rate is also formulated for the large cracking state including viscoplasticity. The validation and performance of the modified algorithm implemented in a special finite element program is exemplified through several single‐element tests as well as three structural applications. The last example examines the model in the seismic fracture analysis of Koyna dam as a benchmark problem and the resulting crack profile is compared with the available experiment. The numerical experimentations well demonstrate that the developed model whose modification is necessary to properly simulate the cyclic behavior of plain concrete subjected to large tensile strains is robust and reasonably accurate. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quantifying groundwater dependency of riparian surface hydrologic features using the exit gradient

Numerical groundwater flow models necessarily are limited to subsurface flow evaluation. It is of interest, however, to examine the possibility that, for unconfined aquifer systems, they could be used to proportionately measure the magnitude of seepage they estimate when these aquifers intersect the landscape surface. Our goal in this study was to determine the degree to which an unconfined groundwater model can estimate run‐off or seepage at the land surface during winter time wet season conditions, as well as in the dry season, when evapotranspiration is a major part of the water balance, using a lowland basin‐fill example study area in the Pacific Northwest. The exit gradient is a metric describing the potential for vertical seepage at the landscape surface. We investigated the spatial relationship of mapped surface features, such as wetlands, streams and ponds, to the model‐predicted mapped exit gradient. We found that areas mapped as wetlands had positive exit gradients. During the wet season, modelled exit gradients predicted seepage throughout extensive areas of the groundwater shed, extending far beyond mapped wetland areas (355% increase), associated with previously observed increases in nitrate‐nitrogen in streams in wet season. During the dry season, exit gradients spatially corresponded with wetland areas. The increase in in‐stream nitrogen corresponds with shorter residence times in carbon‐rich wetland zones because of the onset of saturation overland flow. We present results that suggest that the exit gradient could be a useful concept in examining the groundwater–surface water linkage that is often under represented physically in watershed flow models. Published 2015. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.     

Varieties of flood risk governance in Europe: How do countries respond to driving forces and what explains institutional change?

Floods are challenging the resilience of societies all over the world. In many countries there are discussions on diversifying the strategies for flood risk management, which implies some sort of policy change. To understand the possibilities of such change, a thorough understanding of the forces of stability and change of underlying governance arrangements is required. It follows from the path dependency literature that countries which rely strongly on flood infrastructures, as part of flood defense strategies, would be more path dependent. Consequently there is a higher chance to find more incremental change in these countries than in countries that have a more diversified set of strategies. However, comparative and detailed empirical studies that may help scrutinize this assumption are lacking.To address this knowledge gap, this paper investigates how six European countries (Belgium, England, France, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden) essentially differ with regard to their governance of flood risks. To analyze stability and change, we focus on how countries are responding to certain societal and ecological driving forces (ecological turn; climate change discourses; European policies; and the increasing prevalence of economic rationalizations) that potentially affect the institutional arrangements for flood risk governance. Taking both the variety of flood risk governance in countries and their responses to driving forces into account, we can clarify the conditions of stability or change of flood risk governance arrangements more generally. The analysis shows that the national-level impact of driving forces is strongly influenced by the flood risk governance arrangements in the six countries. Path dependencies are indeed visible in countries with high investments in flood infrastructure accompanied by strongly institutionalized governance arrangements (Poland, the Netherlands) but not only there. Also more diversified countries that are less dependent on flood infrastructure and flood defense only (England) show path dependencies and mostly incremental change. More substantial changes are visible in countries that show moderate diversification of strategies (Belgium, France) or countries that ‘have no strong path yet’ in comprehensive flood risk governance (Sweden). This suggests that policy change can be expected when there is both the internal need and will to change and a barrage of (external) driving forces pushing for change.