Seismic excitations may lead to collisions between adjacent civil engineering structures causing major damage. In this paper, an effective equation for calculating the gap size index is proposed so as to provide the optimum separation distance preventing structural pounding during different earthquakes. Evaluation of the best prediction of the required separation distance between two adjacent buildings was carried out by using...

Optical, photo-electrochemical, crystallographic and morphological properties of TiO2 thin films prepared by high power impulse magnetron sputtering at low substrate temperatures (<65 ◦C) without post-deposition thermal annealing are studied. The film composition-anatase, rutile or amorphous TiO2-is adjusted by the pressure (p ∼ 0.75-15 Pa) in the deposition chamber. The different crystallographic phases were determined with grazing...

We give an elementary proof of a celebrated theorem of Cappell, Lee and Miller which relates the Maslov index of a pair of paths of Lagrangian subspaces to the spectral flow of an associated path of self-adjoint first-order operators. We particularly pay attention to the continuity of the latter path of operators, where we consider the gap-metric on the set of all closed operators on a Hilbert space. Finally, we obtain from Cappell,...

We report the optical properties of a carbon nitride (CNx) film as a function of nitrogen concentration (N/C) of the deposited film. As nitrogen concentration is increased (N/C ratio) in a CNx film, the refractive index and band gap also increase. The real and imaginary parts, n and k (refractive index and extinction coefficient) of the complex refraction index of carbon nitride films were determined by spectroscopic ellipsometry...