Steel Pedestrian Bridge to Protect a Unique Tree

This paper describes the “Variation Guggenheim 3: Mirador de la palmera” project, situated in Daya Vieja (Alicante-Spain). This structure is inspired by the Guggenheim museum of New York and is designed to protect a land-mark palm-tree from wind loads. This six – trunk palm tree was declared monument by the Valencian government in 2012. The structure that now protect it appears to fly around de palm tree creating a helicoidally skywalk made of steel, while retrofitting the lateral trunks of the tree to protect them from collapse. An 18 m. long straight beam starts on the top of this helix, and stretches towards a lookout point that offers a view of the whole village and its surroundings. The reduction of the visual impact of the structure on the tree was a major aim for the project design. The structural elements are as slender as possible to avoid the visual obstruction of tree. They are painted white, while the walkway steel corrugated plate is painted green in order to highlight its neat shape among the blur created by the apparent mess of bars of the supporting structure. The two main piles of this pedestrian bridge were designed in steel and geometrically resemble trees. A Ground Penetrating Radar analysis was performed to detect the palm root location and to decide the best foundation system. Slender cast in-situ steel-concrete micropiles along with a concrete pile-cap, raised some centimeters above the ground level, were used to reduce the damage to the roots. The projected pile-cap is a slender, continuous, circular ring; which geometry resembles a concrete bench. This structure has been a finalist in the Architecture Awards for the 2010-2014 best construction projects, held by the Diputación de Alicante.

Towards a real-time 3D object recognition pipeline on mobile GPGPU computing platforms using low-cost RGB-D sensors

In this project, we propose the implementation of a 3D object recognition system which will be optimized to operate under demanding time constraints. The system must be robust so that objects can be recognized properly in poor light conditions and cluttered scenes with significant levels of occlusion. An important requirement must be met: the system must exhibit a reasonable performance running on a low power consumption mobile GPU computing platform (NVIDIA Jetson TK1) so that it can be integrated in mobile robotics systems, ambient intelligence or ambient assisted living applications. The acquisition system is based on the use of color and depth (RGB-D) data streams provided by low-cost 3D sensors like Microsoft Kinect or PrimeSense Carmine. The range of algorithms and applications to be implemented and integrated will be quite broad, ranging from the acquisition, outlier removal or filtering of the input data and the segmentation or characterization of regions of interest in the scene to the very object recognition and pose estimation. Furthermore, in order to validate the proposed system, we will create a 3D object dataset. It will be composed by a set of 3D models, reconstructed from common household objects, as well as a handful of test scenes in which those objects appear. The scenes will be characterized by different levels of occlusion, diverse distances from the elements to the sensor and variations on the pose of the target objects. The creation of this dataset implies the additional development of 3D data acquisition and 3D object reconstruction applications. The resulting system has many possible applications, ranging from mobile robot navigation and semantic scene labeling to human-computer interaction (HCI) systems based on visual information.

The European response to the challenge of the Japanese steel industry (1950–1980)

Between 1950 and 1980, the European delay with respect to Japan and the relative loss of competitiveness in the integrated steel industry was due to an institutional, geographical and economic logic based largely on historical factors. Europe had a long steel-making history that was closely related to its sources of raw materials. The new technological paradigm turned this former advantage into a clear disadvantage, while the large investments made in the Thomas and open hearth processes and the affordable price of scrap delayed the adoption of the Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) until its superiority had been clearly demonstrated. The European steel industry was not at the forefront of the transformation, but merely adapting to the changes, pushed by the threat of a new uncomfortable competitor.

Variation Guggenheim 3. A Pedestrian Steel Structure

Pedestrian Unique Bridge in prestesed white concrete. Pilar de la Horadada. Alicante.

Compressive behaviour of a tire recycled steel and textil fiber concrete subjected to fire

The use of rubber aggregates, steel and textile fibres recycled from tires in concrete is a solution that it is being studied by several authors around the world. A few works have been carried out at room temperature but very scarce at high temperatures. This paper presents the results of a research with the aim to evaluate the behaviour at high temperatures of a concrete made with different amounts of recycled textile and steel fibres from tires. The study considered five concrete compositions, with the same water/cement ratio (W/C=0.43), differing only in the type and quantity of fibers incorporated in the mixture. Thus, a reference composition (0% fiber), two compositions with 30 and 70kg/m3 of steel fibers and a composition with 2 and 4kg/m3 of textile fibers from tires were tested. The concrete was tested for a load level of 0.5fcd and different maximum temperature levels (20, 300, 500 and 700ºC).