Two dimensional meso-scale concrete modeling was used in finite element analysis of plain concrete beam subjected to bending. The plane stress 4-noded quadrilateral elements were utilized to model coarse aggregate, cement mortar. The effect of aggregate fraction distribution, and pores percent of the total area – resulting from air voids entrapped in concrete during placement on the behavior of plain concrete beam in flexural was detected. Aggregate size fractions were randomly distributed across the profile area of the beam. Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) was employed to treat the discontinuities problems result from double phases of concrete and cracking that faced during the finite element analysis of concrete beam. Crac

    Literature reviews of reports concerning the parasitic fauna of fishes of Al-Diwaniyah province, Iraq till the end of December 2018 showed that a total of 43 parasite species are so far known from 13 valid fish species investigated for parasitic infections. The parasitic fauna included one euglenozoan, two myzozoans, six ciliophorans, three myxozoans, three trematodes, nine monogeneans, four cestodes, six nematodes, three acanthocephalans and six crustaceans. The infection with the trematodes, one monogenean, two cestodes and one nematode occurred with larval stages, while the remaining infections were either with trophozoites or adult parasites. Among the inspected fishes, Carasobarbus luteus was infected wit

This paper presents a meta-heuristic swarm based optimization technique for solving robot path planning. The natural activities of actual ants inspire which named Ant Colony Optimization. (ACO) has been proposed in this work to find the shortest and safest path for a mobile robot in different static environments with different complexities. A nonzero size for the mobile robot has been considered in the project by taking a tolerance around the obstacle to account for the actual size of the mobile robot. A new concept was added to standard Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for further modifications. Simulations results, which carried out using MATLAB 2015(a) environment, prove that the suggested algorithm outperforms the standard version of AC

This study aims at shedding light on the linguistic significance of collocation networks in the academic writing context. Following Firth’s principle “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” The study intends to examine three selected nodes (i.e. research, study, and paper) shared collocations in an academic context. This is achieved by using the corpus linguistic tool; GraphColl in #LancsBox software version 5 which was announced in June 2020 in analyzing selected nodes. The study focuses on academic writing of two corpora which were designed and collected especially to serve the purpose of the study. The corpora consist of a collection of abstracts extracted from two different academic journals that publish for writ

In the present study benzofuran based chalcones 1 (a, b) are synthesized by condensing aromatic aldehydes with 2-acetylbenzofuran in the presence suitable base. These chalcones are very useful precursors for the synthesis of pyrazoline, isoxazoline, pyrmidine, cyclohexenone and indazole derivatives. All these compounds are characterized by their melting points, FTIR and 1 HMNR (for some of them) spectral dat

This paper demonstrates the spatial response uniformity (SRU) of two types of heterojunctions (CdS, PbS /Si) laser detectors. The spatial response nonuniformity of these heterojunctions is not significant and it is negligible in comparison with p+- n silicon photodiode. Experimental results show that the uniformity of CdS /Si is better than that of PbS /Si heterojunction