An analytical model is developed to study the coupling effects in
cord-rubber composite materials. The analytical model takes into account
the mismatch of stiffness between the cords and the rubber matrix
material, and the twist-extension coupling. The transverse deformation,
i.e., normal to the cords direction is based on the normal modes of a
special system which describes the orthotropic and the coupling
behaviour of cord-rubber composites. The equations of motion for the
cord-composite plates are derived using the principle of virtual work.
Results of deformation and stresses are obtained for some typical
cord-rubber composite plates and are compared to the existing solutions.
The results presented illustrate that the coupling effects are

 The main purpose of this paper is to complete the works presented by
Andrieux and Varé (2002) and El Arem et al. (2003) by taking into
account the effects of shearing in the constitutive equations of a beam
cracked section in bi-axial flexure. The paper describes the derivation
of a lumped cracked beam model from the three-dimensional formulation of
the general problem of elasticity with unilateral contact conditions on
the crack lips. Properties of the potential energy and convex analysis
are used to reduce the three-dimensional computations needed for the
model identification, and to derive the final form of the elastic energy
that determines the nonlinear constitutive equations of the cracked

 In countries with a moderate seismic hazard, the classical methods
developed for strong motion prone countries to estimate the seismic
behaviour and subsequent vulnerability of existing buildings are often
inadequate and not financially realistic. The main goals of this paper
are to show how the modal analysis can contribute to the understanding
of the seismic building response and the good relevancy of a modal model
based on ambient vibrations for estimating the structural deformation
under weak earthquakes. We describe the application of an enhanced modal
analysis technique (frequency domain decomposition) to process ambient
vibration recordings taken at the Grenoble City Hall building (France).

 The main purpose of this work is to present a new parallel direct solver: Dissection solver. It is based on LU
factorization of the sparse matrix of the linear system and allows to
detect automatically and handle properly the zero-energy modes, which
are important when dealing with DDM. A performance evaluation and
comparisons with other direct solvers (MUMPS, DSCPACK) are also given
for both sequential and parallel computations. Results of numerical
experiments with a two-level parallelization of large-scale structural
analysis problems are also presented: FETI is used for the global
problem parallelization and Dissection for the local