Pushover Analyses of Hand-Loaded Steel Storage Shelving Racks

Among the various types of industrial solutions used to store goods and products, the light duty hand loaded shelving rack (SR) typology represents a very popular solution for domestic applications, libraries and for superstores/markets open to the public. Despite the limited cost, an eventual collapse could result in significant damage of stored goods, injuries, and potentially the loss of human life, with the possible consequence of a long suspension of commercial activities. This reflects directly on the great importance of a correct design that, despite the large use of SRs, is nowadays developed with approaches characterized by inadequate levels of reliability.

A research program on SRs is currently in progress in Italy, with the aim of improving the rules for both static and seismic design and this article presents a combined experimental-numerical study. Both component and pushover tests have been carried out, that are shortly summarized. Overall frame response has been simulated by means of advanced finite element software able to capture key features of the nonlinear response of slender frames with mono-symmetric cross-section members.     

What's in a perspective? The history of mexicanist anthropology

Hewitt de Alcántara, Cynthia. Anthropological Perspectives on Rural Mexico. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. xiv + 224 pp. including footnotes and index. $32.95 cloth.     

Oxalate Patinas on Stone Monuments in the Venetian Lagoon: Characterization and Origin

Calcium oxalate patinas have been sampled on architectural elements of two ancient churches located on Torcello Island (Venetian Lagoon) and subsequently analyzed. The site had been selected presenting patinas of exceptional amount and thickness, elsewhere generally found as thin alteration layers covering stone surfaces or within black crusts on monuments in urban environments. Optical and mineralogical analyses suggest that these patinas are not the result of a simple deposition process, but originate as surface “transformations” of the substrate, and are mainly composed of dihydrate calcium oxalate (weddellite) and gypsum. Among the experimental techniques, isotope analyses (C and S) have been specifically carried out aiming at achieving a better understanding of their origin and possible causes of formation. The observed carbon isotopic fingerprint reveals in fact a strong biological fractionation recorded in the oxalate patina (δ¹³C ranging from ?22.3‰ to ?28.0‰), almost exclusively attributable to C3 pathway photosynthesis processes. Slightly negative sulfur isotope ratio values seem to be inversely correlated with patina exposure to atmospheric agents and pollutants. The results obtained prove that calcium oxalate originates from a biomineralization process induced by lichen colonization in specific environmental conditions.     

Effect on the Structure in Elevation of Wood Deterioration on Small-Pile Foundation: Numerical Analyses

Wooden pile foundations are quite common in Venice historical building. Very short, small-diameter piles are embedded into the soft shallowest soil layer under the groundwater level, but wood degradation is not prevented as anaerobic bacteria can flourish even in anoxic condition. This study couples the behavior of the masonry structure and the foundation as result of pile degradation. The numerical analyses, relative to the ancient piling, consider wood decay and secondary settlement of soil. The effect of deterioration as a function of the pile spacing and the possible presence of a stiff layer under pile tips are also investigated. The geotechnical results are then used as input for the structural model. The behavior of the masonry as result of different states of wood conservation along the wall is studied numerically.     

The tourist landscape paradox

This paper is about tourist practices of landscape. Landscape has long been a key reference point in the construction of tourist imaginaries and, to this day, plays an important role in tourists' experience of travelling and their encounters with Otherness. Yet the ambivalent ways in which tourists conceptualize landscape is inherently paradoxical; indeed, it is by travelling that tourists try to overcome the tension produced by such a paradox. Putting into practice two alternative conceptions of landscape at once—a ‘Vidalian’ landscape-as-essence and a ‘Cosgrovian’ landscape as ‘way of seeing’—the tourist inevitably falls into an intriguing epistemological trap. Tourists' embodiment of the landscape experience becomes an attempt to evade that trap. In this paper, I note how this is exemplified in the ways in which tourist rhetoric frames the idea of Morocco and, in particular, the Jamaa el Fna square in Marrakech, the most ‘landscaped’ (and photographed) tourist site in the Maghreb. To help unpack this paradox, I take a brief look at what tourists actually do in the Jamaa el Fna, in order to reproduce, in place, their landscape-driven idea of Moroccan cultural space. The spatial practices of most tourists in that iconic place reveal, indeed, that the landscape paradox that drives tourist readings of the Jamaa el Fna cannot be avoided, but only endlessly performed, for this paradox is constitutive of the very formation of the Modern travelling European subject.     

Permian non-marine bivalves of the Falkland Islands and their palaeoenvironmental significance

Simões, M.G., Quaglio, F., Warren, L., Anelli, L.E., Stone, P., Riccomini, C., Grohmann, C.H. & Chamani, M.A.C. December 2012. Permian non-marine bivalves of the Falkland Islands and their palaeoenvironmental significance. Alcheringa 36, 543–554. ISSN 0311-5518.

We describe the occurrence of non-marine bivalves in exposures of the Middle Permian (Capitanian) Brenton Loch Formation on the southern shore of Choiseul Sound, East Falklands. The bivalves are associated with ichnofossils and were collected from a bed in the upper part of the formation, within a 25 cm thick interval of dark siltstones and mudstones with planar lamination, overlain by massive sandstones. The shells are articulated, with the valves either splayed open or closed. At the top of the succession, mudstone beds nearly 1.5 m above the bivalve-bearing layers yielded well-preserved Glossopteris sp. cf. G. communis leaf fossils. The closed articulated condition of some shells indicates preservation under high sedimentation rates with low residence time of bioclasts at the sediment/water interface. However, the presence of specimens with splayed shells is usually correlated to the slow decay of the shell ligament in oxygen-deficient bottom waters. The presence of complete carbonized leaves of Glossopteris associated with the bivalve-bearing levels also suggests a possibly dysoxic-anoxic bottom environment. Overall, our data suggest that the bivalves were preserved by abrupt burial, possibly by distal sediment flows into a Brenton Loch lake, and may represent autochthonous to parautochthonous fossil accumulations. The shells resemble those of anthracosiids and are herein assigned to Palaeanodonta sp. aff. P. dubia, a species also found in the Permian succession of the Karoo Basin, South Africa. Our results confirm that (a) the true distributions in space and time of all Permian non-marine (freshwater) bivalves are not yet well known, and (b) there is no evidence for marine conditions in the upper part of the Brenton Loch Formation.     

Micro-Politics of a Makeshift Refugee Camp: The Grafosrem Factory in Šid,Serbia

With the EU's increasingly militarised and violent external borders, makeshift refugee camps have developed into crucial nodes along the “Balkan Route” where refugees reside between their clandestine border-crossing attempts. Though a rich body of scholarship has recently emerged on the makeshift camp, there remains limited engagement on the complex and dynamic social and political lives produced within these spaces. Building upon ethnographic fieldwork in the makeshift camp of the abandoned Grafosrem factory in the border town of Šid, Serbia, this paper examines, in particular, the micro-politics produced by the camp's different actors (leaders, residents, outcasts, volunteers). This paper also emphasises how aspects such as race, gender, age, class, and language are at play in dictating the differential access, power, privileges, violence, and exclusion taking place among Grafosrem's diverse subjects, and in generating a multiplicity of lived experiences of the makeshift camp and the corridor more generally.     

Effectiveness of FRCM Reinforcement Applied to Masonry Walls Subject to Axial Force and Out-Of-Plane Loads Evaluated by Experimental and Numerical Studies

ABSTRACT

An experimental campaign and a numerical analysis devoted to the investigation of the out-of-plane behavior of masonry walls reinforced with Fiber Reinforced Cementitious Matrix (FRCM) are presented here. The main goal of this study is to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the strengthening system, by discussing failure modes and capacity of strengthened masonry walls, in order to assess their behavior under out-of-plane horizontal actions, such as, for example, seismic actions. A purposely designed experimental set-up, able to separately and independently apply an axial force and out-of-plane horizontal actions on masonry walls, was used. Experimental results are discussed and compared with the outcomes of nonlinear analyses performed on simplified finite element models of the walls. A proper evaluation of the flexural capacity of FRCM strengthened walls is the first step of the ongoing process of drawing reliable code guidelines leading to a safe design of strengthened masonry structures.