Mitigation of Tsunami Debris Impact on Reinforced Concrete Buildings by Fender Structures

Buildings located in coastal regions are prone to tsunami dangers, which often carry debris in the form of shipping containers and boats. This paper presents an approach for the design of fender structures to minimize debris impacts on buildings. The impact of shipping containers, which are categorized as large debris, is considered in the study. Since the weights of shipping containers are standardized, the impact energy can be related to other debris. For a fender structure, cone-type rubber fenders are used to resist the impact of the shipping container. Various fender reactions are considered as parameters to study the efficiency of the fenders. The displacement-controlled nonlinear static analysis is carried out to determine the building capacity. The energy approach for shipping container impact is used to evaluate the resistance of the building. Capacity curves, energy absorptions, inter-story drift ratios of the buildings with and without a fender structure, and the efficiency of the fender are presented. The buildings with a fender structure can absorb the energy from the impact of a loaded shipping container. Conversely, the building without a fender structure cannot resist the impact of a loaded shipping container. From the obtained results, a recommendation is given for buildings with a fender structure. The hydrodynamic force on the fender structure is transferred to the main building through the fender. Hence, the yield force of the fenders affects the performance of the main building that must be considered in the design.

The Vulnerability and Resilience of the Global Container Shipping Industry

Intermodal shipping containers, standardized and capable of being carried on trucks, trains, barges, or ships, have transformed the global economy since they were introduced in 1959. By allowing previously separated segments of regional and global transport systems to interact, they have vastly expanded global trade and facilitated supply chains that stretch around the world. But vulnerabilities in the system became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Problems at key bottlenecks in the system, compounded by an unexpected six-day shutdown of the vital Suez Canal, precipitated global disruptions leading to shortages of goods and soaring prices around the world. As the global shipping industry recovers, it will have an opportunity to transition toward a system that is more resilient.

Architectural building design with refurbished shipping containers: a typological and modular approach

Construction of housing buildings using refurbished shipping containers constitutes a successful recent building system. As construction modules, disposed and recycled containers are considered to contribute for a sustainable construction system. This article aims to contribute to a better understanding on this construction system, in particular the architectural project. A methodology based on the typological and modular coordination is proposed as a key tool to help for the development of spatial arrangements by considering the shipping container as a unit/module. The functional occupation typologies were proposed to characterize the main housing activities to be considered in modular coordinated design, allowing to adapt the housing to the family needs according to their social and cultural dynamics. The module constitution and geometry considering two commercial maritime shipping containers are presented.

Feeder Scheduling and Container Transportation with the Factors of Draught and Bridge in the Yangtze River, China

Inland shipping in the Yangtze River in China has become very prosperous, making feeder scheduling and container transportation increasingly difficult for feeder operators. This research analyzed the decision-making of container transportation businesses in feeder companies operating between Shanghai Port and inland ports along the Yangtze River in China. The research considered the complexity of the natural conditions and water channels, including the draught limitations and the height of the bridges over the river. To analyze ways to increase the effectiveness of shipping containers from Shanghai Port into inland river ports along the Yangtze River, we built a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to minimize the total operating cost and determine the most effective departure time of each feeder. After linearizing the model, we designed a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to increase solution efficiency and introduced a taboo list and aspiration criterion of a Taboo Search (TS) algorithm to improve the PSO algorithm. Finally, we verified the accuracy of the model and the efficiency of the algorithms using numerical experiments. The research provides theoretical guidance for feeder operators and inland river shipping companies.

Current and Prospective Radiation Detection Systems, Screening Infrastructure and Interpretive Algorithms for the Non-Intrusive Screening of Shipping Container Cargo: A Review

The non-intrusive screening of shipping containers at national borders serves as a prominent and vital component in deterring and detecting the illicit transportation of radioactive and/or nuclear materials which could be used for malicious and highly damaging purposes. Screening systems for this purpose must be designed to efficiently detect and identify material that could be used to fabricate radiological dispersal or improvised nuclear explosive devices, while having minimal impact on the flow of cargo and also being affordable for widespread implementation. As part of current screening systems, shipping containers, offloaded from increasingly large cargo ships, are driven through radiation portal monitors comprising plastic scintillators for gamma detection and separate, typically 3He-based, neutron detectors. Such polyvinyl-toluene plastic-based scintillators enable screening systems to meet detection sensitivity standards owing to their economical manufacturing in large sizes, producing high-geometric-efficiency detectors. However, their poor energy resolution fundamentally limits the screening system to making binary “source” or “no source” decisions. To surpass the current capabilities, future generations of shipping container screening systems should be capable of rapid radionuclide identification, activity estimation and source localisation, without inhibiting container transportation. This review considers the physical properties of screening systems (including detector materials, sizes and positions) as well as the data collection and processing algorithms they employ to identify illicit radioactive or nuclear materials. The future aim is to surpass the current capabilities by developing advanced screening systems capable of characterising radioactive or nuclear materials that may be concealed within shipping containers.

The production of valuable products and fuel from plastic waste in Africa

Global plastic waste generation is about 300 million metric tons annually and poses crucial health and environmental problems. Africa is the second most polluted continent in the world, with over 500 shipping containers of waste being imported every month. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report suggests that about 75% of this plastic waste ends up in landfills. However, landfills management is associated with high environmental costs and loss of energy. In addition, landfill leachates end up in water bodies, are very detrimental to human health, and poison marine ecosystems. Therefore, it is imperative to explore eco-friendly techniques to transform plastic waste into valuable products in a sustainable environment. The trade-offs of using plastic waste for road construction and as a component in cementitious composites are discussed. The challenges and benefits of producing liquid fuels from plastic waste are also addressed. The recycling of plastic waste to liquid end-products was found to be a sustainable way of helping the environment with beneficial economic impact.

An Improved Character Recognition Framework for Containers Based on DETR Algorithm

An improved DETR (detection with transformers) object detection framework is proposed to realize accurate detection and recognition of characters on shipping containers. ResneSt is used as a backbone network with split attention to extract features of different dimensions by multi-channel weight convolution operation, thus increasing the overall feature acquisition ability of the backbone. In addition, multi-scale location encoding is introduced on the basis of the original sinusoidal position encoding model, improving the sensitivity of input position information for the transformer structure. Compared with the original DETR framework, our model has higher confidence regarding accurate detection, with detection accuracy being improved by 2.6%. In a test of character detection and recognition with a self-built dataset, the overall accuracy can reach 98.6%, which meets the requirements of logistics information identification acquisition.

Location and sensing network for industrial automation

The usages of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been growing exponentially. WSN are utilized for variety of applications such as monitoring environmental conditions of shipping containers or monitoring the utilization status of construction equipment. There have been many incremental enhancements with respect to energy efficiency and latency improvement of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) protocols; however, localizing WSNs in indoor environments is poorly understood. In this thesis reports, the performance of existing protocol designs under the assumption that indoor positioning is required will be evaluated. More specifically, the metric considered for this study includes throughput, latency and energy efficiency. Afterwards, an energy efficient WSN protocol is presented called the Location and Sensing Network (LSN) that also has indoor positioning capabilities.