Soft clays are generally characterized by low shear strength, low permeability and high compressibility. An effective method to accelerate consolidation of such soils is to use vertical drains along with vacuum preloading to encourage radial flow of water.  In this research numerical modeling of prefabricated vertical drains with vacuum pressure was done to investigate the effect of using vertical drains together with vacuum pressure on the degree of saturation of fully and saturated-unsaturated soft soils.  Laboratory experiments were conducted by using a specially-designed large consolidometer cell where a central drain was installed and vacuum pressure was applied. All tests were conducted

    Identification of complex communities in biological networks is a critical and ongoing challenge since lots of network-related problems correspond to the subgraph isomorphism problem known in the literature as NP-hard. Several optimization algorithms have been dedicated and applied to solve this problem. The main challenge regarding the application of optimization algorithms, specifically to handle large-scale complex networks, is their relatively long execution time. Thus, this paper proposes a parallel extension of the PSO algorithm to detect communities in complex biological networks. The main contribution of this study is summarized in three- fold; Firstly, a modified PSO algorithm with a local search operator is proposed

In petroleum industry, the early knowledge of “pore pressure gradient” is the basis in well design and the extraction of these information is more direct when the pore pressure gradient is equal to normal gradient; however, this matter will be more complex if it deviate from that limit which is called “abnormal pore pressure”, if this variable does not put in consideration, then many drilling problems will occur might lead to entire hole loss. To estimate the pore pressure gradient there are several methods, in this study; Eaton method’s is selected to extract the underground pressure program using drilling data (normalized rate of penetration) and logs data (sonic and density log). The results shows that an abnormal high press

The study is based on the selective binding ability of the drug compound procaine (PRO) on a surface imprinted with nylon 6 (N6) polymer. Physical characterization of the polymer template was performed by X-ray diffraction and DSC thermal analysis. The imprinted polymer showed a high adsorption capacity to trap procaine (237 µg/g) and excellent recognition ability with an imprinted factor equal to 3.2. The method was applied to an extraction column simulating a solid-phase extraction to separate the drug compound in the presence of tinoxicam and nucleosimide separately and in a mixture of them with a recovery rate more than the presence of tinoxicam and nucleosimide separately and in a mixture of them with a recovery rate of more t

The different interactions between cometary tail and solar wind ions are studied in the present paper based on three-dimensional Lax explicit method. The model used in this research is based on the continuity equations describing the cometary tail-solar wind interactions. Three dimensional system was considered in this paper. Simulation of the physical system was achieved using computer code written using Matlab 7.0. The parameters studied here assumed Halley comet type and include the particle density , the particles velocity v, the magnetic field strength B, dynamic pressure p and internal energy E. The results of the present research showed that the interaction near the cometary nucleus is mainly affected by the new ions added to the

This paper presents a new transform method to solve partial differential equations, for finding suitable accurate solutions in a wider domain. It can be used to solve the problems without resorting to the frequency domain. The new transform is combined with the homotopy perturbation method in order to solve three dimensional second order partial differential equations with initial condition, and the convergence of the solution to the exact form is proved. The implementation of the suggested method demonstrates the usefulness in finding exact solutions. The practical implications show the effectiveness of approach and it is easily implemented in finding exact solutions.

       Finally, all algori