No Arabic abstract
Two different way of assessing seismic vulnerability are available nowadays: observed or empirical and calculated vulnerability assessment methods. The first methods are based on observed damage after earthquakes correlated with the structural properties of buildings, whereas the second methods are based on numerical models more or less representing the buildings. In both cases, the trouble is the imperfect knowledge of existing buildings. We propose here a new method for estimating the vulnerability based on experimental modal parameters (resonance frequencies, modal shapes and damping ratio) estimated under ambient vibrations. They allow to build up a simplified numerical model of the elastic building behaviour. The motion produced by numerous earthquakes leads to determine its first damage level and therefore its vulnerability. An inter-story drift threshold based on HAZUS values defines the first damage level of the building. This method is applied to the Grenoble (France) city in which 60 buildings have been instrumented.
The paper presents a new stiffness modelling method for overconstrained parallel manipulators, which is applied to 3-d.o.f. translational mechanisms. It is based on a multidimensional lumped-parameter model that replaces the link flexibility by localized 6-d.o.f. virtual springs. In contrast to other works, the method includes a FEA-based link stiffness evaluation and employs a new solution strategy of the kinetostatic equations, which allows computing the stiffness matrix for the overconstrained architectures and for the singular manipulator postures. The advantages of the developed technique are confirmed by application examples, which deal with comparative stiffness analysis of two translational parallel manipulators.
The [ISO 1101] standard specifies the form errors with geometrical tolerances using the zone concept.To complete this concept, we present a generic method which adapts to any geometry and allows to describe any kind of errors. Thus,we can dissociate the part errors according to reference categories: position, orientation,form, waviness and roughnesses. Starting from a cloud of poinds representing the error measurement, the modal method decompose, like Fourier series,this error in a sum of sorted errors according to the ircomplexity degree (a number of wavinesses). In addition, we propose to show, on a simple example, that according to error complexity to be characterized, an interpolation by the modal method allows to optimize the measuring strategy.
The first parts of the thesis recalls the main features of the large MACRO experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory. It then describes the atmospheric muons measured by the experiment and the selection criteria to obtain and analyze a large sample of cosmic muons. The time series of MACRO muons was analyzed with two complementary approaches: search for the occurrence of bursts of muon events and search for periodicities in the muon time distribution. The Scan Statistics method was used in the first case and the Lomb-Scargle spectral analysis in the second case. The two techniques complete early analyses performed with folding methods. It is confirmed that the seasonal variation is the dominant periodic variation, and one also confirms the solar diurnal and sidereal modulations. A separate study concerns the analysis of the energy losses of the hypothetical Nuclearites in different materials and detectors; their importance for the searches performed by the MACRO and the SLIM experiments is discussed.
We describe a conjectural construction (in the spirit of Hilberts 12th problem) of units in abelian extensions of certain base fields which are neither totally real nor CM. These base fields are quadratic extensions with exactly one complex place of a totally real number field F, and are referred to as Almost Totally real (ATR) extensions. Our construction involves certain null-homologous topological cycles on the Hilbert modular variety attached to F. The special units are the images of these cycles under a map defined by integration of weight two Eisenstein series on GL_2(F). This map is formally analogous to the higher Abel-Jacobi maps that arise in the theory of algebraic cycles. We show that our conjecture is compatible with Starks conjecture for ATR extensions; it is, however, a genuine strengthening of Starks conjecture in this context since it gives an analytic formula for the arguments of the Stark units and not just for their absolute values. The last section provides numerical evidences for our conjecture.
The aim of this study is to produce a kinematic analysis of movements of the shoulder complex when hemiparetic patients achieve the grasping of weighted objects. We propose to describe the influence of the weight on kinematic characteristics of the gesture and to establish the relevance of several quantitative indexes concerning the quality of the grasping gesture.