The coupling effect of initial shear stress and thermal cycles on the thermomechanical behaviour of clay concrete and sand-concrete interfaces has been studied. A set of drained monotonic direct shear tests was conducted at the soil-concrete interface level. Samples were initially sheared to half of the material's shear strength and then they were subjected to five heating/cooling cycles before being sheared to failure. The test results showed that the effect of thermal cycles on the shear strength of the materials was negligible, yet shear displacement occurred during application of thermal cycles without an increase in shear stress, confirming the coupling between the shear stress and temperature. In addition, a slight increase of stiffness due to the coupling was observed which diminished with further shearing.

@en

This paper develops an enhanced low-rank structured covariance reconstruction (LRSCR) method based on the decoupled atomic norm minimization (D-ANM), for super-resolution two-dimensional (2D) harmonic retrieval with multiple measurement vectors. This LRSCR-D-ANM approach exploits a potential structure hidden in the covariance by transferring the basic LRSCR to an efficient D-ANM formulation, which permits a sparse representation over a matrix-form atom set with decoupled 1D frequency components. The new LRSCR-D-ANM method builds upon the existence of a generalized Vandermonde decomposition of its solution, which otherwise cannot be guaranteed by the basic LRSCR unless a very conservative condition holds. Further, a low-complexity solution of the LRSCR-D-ANM is provided for fast implementation with negligible performance loss. Simulation results verify the advantages of the proposed LRSCR-D-ANM over the basic LRSCR, in terms of the wider applicability and the lower complexity.@en

This paper develops efficient channel estimation techniques for millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems under practical hardware limitations, including an arbitrary array geometry and a hybrid hardware structure. Taking on an angle-based approach, this work adopts a generalized array manifold separation approach via Jacobi-Anger approximation, which transforms a non-ideal, non-uniform array manifold into a virtual array domain with a desired uniform geometric structure to facilitate super-resolution angle estimation and channel acquisition. Accordingly, structure-based optimization techniques are developed to effectively estimate both the channel covariance and the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) within a short sensing time. The different time-varying scales of channel path angles versus path gains are capitalized to design a two-step CSI estimation scheme that can quickly sense fading channels. Theoretical results are provided on the fundamental limits of the proposed technique in terms of sample efficiency. For computational efficiency, a fast iterative algorithm is developed via the alternating direction method of multipliers. Other related issues such as spurious-peak cancellation in non-uniform linear arrays and extensions to higher-dimensional cases are also discussed. Simulations testify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in hybrid mmWave massive MIMO systems with arbitrary arrays.

@en

There are many real-life processes whose smart control requires processing context information. Though processing time-varied context information is addressed in the literature, domain-independent solutions for reasoning about time-varying process scenarios are scarce. This paper proposes a method for dynamic context computation concerning spatial and attributive information. Context is interpreted as a body of information dynamically created by a pattern of entities and relationships over a history of situations. Time is conceived as a causative force capable of changing situations and acting on people and objects. The invariant and variant spatial information is captured by a two-dimensional spatial feature representation matrix (SFR-matrix). The time-dependent changes in the context information are computed based on a dynamic context information (DCI) management hyper-matrix. This humble but powerful representation lends itself to a quasi-real time computing and is able to provide information about foreseeable happenings over multiple situations. Based on this, the reasoning mechanism proposed in this paper is able to provide informative instructions for users who needed to be informed in a dynamically changing situation. This paper uses the practical case of evacuation of a building in fire both as an explorative case for conceptualization of the functionality of the computational mechanism and as a demonstrative and testing application. Our intention is to use the dynamic context computation mechanism as a kernel component of a reasoning platform for informing cyber-physical systems (I-CPSs). Our future research will address the issue of context information management for multiple interrelated spaces.@en