Lancashire County Council St Michaels and Carnforth Footbridges - United Kingdom

<p>Lancashire County Council (LCC) in UK are a forward thinking and innovative local authority with a significant number of bridges in their asset stock. They commissioned Jacobs to carry out a detailed options study for eight footbridges following concerns that were raised during principal inspections. The options report considered refurbishment and replacement options and the possibility of using new construction materials with the aim of maximizing durability and minimizing maintenance. The recommendations for all footbridges was replace them with Fibre Reinforced Polymer. LCC divided the eight bridges into packages of two according to their budget constraints and issued tender documents to contactors for the first two packages. The first package contractor has successfully delivered two replacement FRP Footbridges of 28m span over railway in Ormskirk. These are the longest simply supported FRP footbridges in the UK. The second tender package to be issued to tender was for St Michaels and Carnforth Footbridges at 37m and 31m spans. The Council wanted FRP Bow String Trusses for these bridges that crossed a River and a Canal respectively. Nothing like this type and scale of footbridges had ever been realized in the UK. This tender was won with an alternative proposal to replace these footbridges with an aluminium solution explaining to the client in doing so the risks and costs involved in designing and fabricating these structures in FRP would be significantly greater. These are the longest aluminum footbridges in the UK of this type.</p>

Evaluating the Downstream Development Strategy of Oil Companies: The Case of Rosneft

The relevance of this study is due to the low rate of development of the downstream sectors of Russian oil companies. Against a background of the sale of significant volumes of oil and gas raw materials, Russia lags behind world leaders in the production and consumption of petrochemical and chemical products, with their share in the gross domestic product of the country being only 1.1%. Connected to this is the issue of substantiating strategies of development for the downstream sectors of Russian oil companies, which requires detailed research. In this light, it is necessary to take into account current trends in the worldwide demand on petroleum products and also the opportunities and competitive advantages of Russian oil and gas companies in the creation and development of refineries with a consideration of modern technological, environmental, social and market criteria. The paper tests hypotheses about modernisation as a process of increasing efficiency in the development of the industry as a whole. The results of the study show that the planned pace of development in the industry by means of modernisation proves to be insufficient and requires additional investments in innovative development and new construction. The value of the research lies in the modelling of modernisation strategy options by the example of a large oil company, the estimation of results by the criteria of world average indices of technological efficiency of production and the analysis of these results by state indicators of branch development. The theoretical significance of the research lies in the possibility of using this research approach as an analogue.

To Rebuild or to Refurbish? An Analysis of the Financial Convenience of Interventions on Urban Consolidated Contexts

In the current historical moment of post-crisis recovery, the real estate sector has a dual role: i) through the construction industry and its impacts on related economic sectors, it is called upon to be an active part of the economic recovery; ii) the enhancement of existing property assets is of primary importance in the containment of greenhouse gases and the achievement of the objectives set by the United Nations [1]. In this context, the various players involved in the real estate market have outlined the importance of being supported by assessment methodologies. That allows to point out not only the opportunities of the investment, but also the risks that may invalidate the initial forecasts, nullifying the success of the initiative. To this end, this research develops a multi-criteria Key Performance Indicator aimed at analyzing the feasibility of real estate initiatives that allows to provide a synthetic scoring on the financial sustainability of each investment and to compare different types of initiatives (e.g. new construction, demolition and reconstruction, renovation, etc.).

The impact of the reconstruction of megablocks (1990-2020) on the quality of common open public spaces: Blocks 21 and 28 in New Belgrade

The quality of common open public spaces is conditioned, among other things, by the layout and characteristics of the facilities located in their immediate vicinity, but also by the functions and contents, equipment and materialization of the ground floor of those facilities. For this reason, interventions on existing facilities and the construction of new ones around common open public spaces can positivelyor negatively affect the quality of these areas. The construction of New Belgrade began in 1948 and continues today. In the area of New Belgrade, the network of common open public spaces covers more than 50% of the total area of the municipality. Initially, the blocks in New Belgrade were built on the basis of a unique planning solution. The transformation of the blocks began in the 1990s in the post-socialist period, when it became possible to change the legal regulations and enable a greater participation of private investments in the processes of reconstruction and new construction. In order to determine the real impact of the reconstruction of mega blocks on the quality of common open public spaces, this paper will present the criteria for determining the quality of these spaces. The criteria will help to examine the differences between the quality of common open public spaces within a block that has had frequent interventions and one where there have been no significant interventions over the last few decades. The conclusions should provide an answer as to whether and to what extent spatial interventions affect the quality of common open public spaces.

Upper bounds on the length function for covering codes with covering radius $ R $ and codimension $ tR+1 $

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>The length function <inline-formula><tex-math id="M3">\begin{document}$ \ell_q(r,R) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is the smallest length of a <inline-formula><tex-math id="M4">\begin{document}$ q $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-ary linear code with codimension (redundancy) <inline-formula><tex-math id="M5">\begin{document}$ r $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> and covering radius <inline-formula><tex-math id="M6">\begin{document}$ R $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>. In this work, new upper bounds on <inline-formula><tex-math id="M7">\begin{document}$ \ell_q(tR+1,R) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> are obtained in the following forms:</p><p style='text-indent:20px;'><disp-formula> <label/> <tex-math id="FE1"> \begin{document}$ \begin{equation*} \begin{split} &amp;(a)\; \ell_q(r,R)\le cq^{(r-R)/R}\cdot\sqrt[R]{\ln q},\; R\ge3,\; r = tR+1,\; t\ge1,\\ &amp;\phantom{(a)\; } q\;{\rm{ is \;an\; arbitrary \;prime\; power}},\; c{\rm{ \;is\; independent \;of\; }}q. \end{split} \end{equation*} $\end{document} </tex-math></disp-formula></p><p style='text-indent:20px;'><disp-formula> <label/> <tex-math id="FE2"> \begin{document}$ \begin{equation*} \begin{split} &amp;(b)\; \ell_q(r,R)&lt; 3.43Rq^{(r-R)/R}\cdot\sqrt[R]{\ln q},\; R\ge3,\; r = tR+1,\; t\ge1,\\ &amp;\phantom{(b)\; } q\;{\rm{ is \;an\; arbitrary\; prime \;power}},\; q\;{\rm{ is \;large\; enough}}. \end{split} \end{equation*} $\end{document} </tex-math></disp-formula></p><p style='text-indent:20px;'>In the literature, for <inline-formula><tex-math id="M8">\begin{document}$ q = (q')^R $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> with <inline-formula><tex-math id="M9">\begin{document}$ q' $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> a prime power, smaller upper bounds are known; however, when <inline-formula><tex-math id="M10">\begin{document}$ q $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is an arbitrary prime power, the bounds of this paper are better than the known ones.</p><p style='text-indent:20px;'>For <inline-formula><tex-math id="M11">\begin{document}$ t = 1 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, we use a one-to-one correspondence between <inline-formula><tex-math id="M12">\begin{document}$ [n,n-(R+1)]_qR $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> codes and <inline-formula><tex-math id="M13">\begin{document}$ (R-1) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-saturating <inline-formula><tex-math id="M14">\begin{document}$ n $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-sets in the projective space <inline-formula><tex-math id="M15">\begin{document}$ \mathrm{PG}(R,q) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>. A new construction of such saturating sets providing sets of small size is proposed. Then the <inline-formula><tex-math id="M16">\begin{document}$ [n,n-(R+1)]_qR $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> codes, obtained by geometrical methods, are taken as the starting ones in the lift-constructions (so-called "<inline-formula><tex-math id="M17">\begin{document}$ q^m $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-concatenating constructions") for covering codes to obtain infinite families of codes with growing codimension <inline-formula><tex-math id="M18">\begin{document}$ r = tR+1 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula><tex-math id="M19">\begin{document}$ t\ge1 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>.</p>

Mixture Optimization of Concrete Paving Blocks Containing Waste Silt

Most of the waste materials recycled for the production of new construction materials are by-products of various manufacturing processes, such as the aggregate washing process. Recycling such materials is of paramount importance since it could reduce the adverse environmental impacts resulting from landfilling. Various studies have attempted to recycle different types of waste materials and by-products into concrete paving blocks. However, the availability of literature on concrete paving blocks containing waste silt is quite scarce. Thus, the current paper focuses on mix design optimization and production of concrete paving blocks containing high amounts of waste silt resulting from the aggregate production process. Using the mixture Design of Experiments (DOE), 12 sets of concrete paving blocks with different aggregate blends were produced to optimize the mix design. Once the final mix design was achieved, the physical and mechanical properties of the concrete paving blocks were investigated following the EN 1338 standard. Shape and dimension measurements and various tests, including water absorption, tensile splitting strength, abrasion resistance, and slip/skid resistance were conducted on the experimental concrete paving samples. Overall, the produced concrete paving blocks showed promising properties for future applications in pedestrian walking paths.

Completeness of Graphical Languages for Mixed State Quantum Mechanics

There exist several graphical languages for quantum information processing, like quantum circuits, ZX-calculus, ZW-calculus, and so on. Each of these languages forms a †-symmetric monoidal category (†-SMC) and comes with an interpretation functor to the †-SMC of finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. In recent years, one of the main achievements of the categorical approach to quantum mechanics has been to provide several equational theories for most of these graphical languages, making them complete for various fragments of pure quantum mechanics. We address the question of how to extend these languages beyond pure quantum mechanics to reason about mixed states and general quantum operations, i.e., completely positive maps. Intuitively, such an extension relies on the axiomatisation of a discard map that allows one to get rid of a quantum system, an operation that is not allowed in pure quantum mechanics. We introduce a new construction, the discard construction , which transforms any †-symmetric monoidal category into a symmetric monoidal category equipped with a discard map. Roughly speaking this construction consists in making any isometry causal. Using this construction, we provide an extension for several graphical languages that we prove to be complete for general quantum operations. However, this construction fails for some fringe cases like Clifford+T quantum mechanics, as the category does not have enough isometries.

Determining the influence of concrete drying shrinkage in the International Roughness Index of newly constructed rigid pavements in Bolivian Altiplano

In the last decade, the design and the construction of concrete pavements in Bolivia focused on prevention of fatigue damage of concrete by the design and construction of locally named "semi-short slabs" concrete pavements, a solution with slab size between traditional JPCP and short slab concrete pavements. Although the structural performance of these new pavements is adequate so far, it was observed that the length of the slab, which commonly is between 2.4 to 3.0 m, affects functional performance. Because of the slabs are affected by differential drying shrinkage, they develop permanent curling with wavelengths that have more influence on IRI with respect to other lengths due to the sensitivity of the Quarter-Car model. This article describes the studies conducted to determine the slab curling influence on IRI of concrete pavements built with semi-short slabs in the last years in the Bolivian Altiplano. Longitudinal profile data was collected by means of a laser profilometer in highway sections located in western Bolivia, in regions with high altitudes and arid climate. Based on profile information, mechanistic analyses were done in order to estimate the theoretical deflections along the slabs that correspond to the observed curling. Deflections calculated were then used to estimate a Pseudo Strain Gradient that represent the effects of curling along the evaluated sections. IRI related to slabs curling was calculated and compared to IRI calculated from artificially generated profiles for various slab lengths. Results indicate that slab curling of these pavements has an important influence on IRI of evaluated sections. Recommendations for specifications of new construction projects are presented.