Computational Methods in Engineering

---

This paper presents a methodology for the assessment of ductility and strength capacities in low-rise buildings. This method utilizes the characteristics of force-displacement for the lowest story level or considers the weakest story in any given low-rise building for its primary analysis. Calculations are based on two levels of earthquake motions, namely strong earthquakes (PGA=0.3 g), and very strong earthquakes (PGA=0.45). Failure mechanism for the structure is established based on three criteria which are: a) bending mode, b) shear mode, and c) shear-bending mode. Evaluation is then performed using a five step procedure starting with a: modeling the building, b) developing the non-linear properties of the model, c) strength calculations, d) ductility calculations, and finally, e) assessing the safety of the building under consideration. All these evaluations are performed based on a matrix format, which simplifies the whole procedure. Developed equations and step-by-step procedure are presented and described in this paper Satisfactory results are obtained from the use of the method developed. Keywords: Strength, Ductility, Failure mechanism, Low-Rise R. C. Buildings

---

The objective of this study is to design a robust direct model reference adaptive controller (DMRAC) for a nonlinear cardiovascular model over a range of plant parameters representing a variety of physical conditions. The direct adaptive controllers used in thisd study require the plant to be almost strictly positive real (ASPR) that is, for a plant to be controlled there must exist a feedback gain such that the resulting closed loop system is strictly positive real. We designed a new compensator so that the system composed of the cardiovascular plant and the compensator satisfy the ASPR condition. Numerous studies in the past have considered a small range of gain variations of the cardiovascular system. In most cases, the controller was designed based on variations in either time delay or plant gains. Many of these workers treated the cardiovascular system as a single-input single output (SISo) plant in which the control output was Mean Arterial Pressure (MAO). We treated the cardiovascular system as a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) plant in which both the MAP and Cardiac Output (CO) are simultaneously controlled. In this study, a new linear model is presented that provides a better approximation thanthe one the original linear model does. By doing so and utilizing the DMRAC algorithm, we could satisfy the stability conditions for the nonlinear model while satisfactory responses obtained under every possible condition for the cardiovascular nonlinear model.