Reinforced concrete (RC) slabs strengthened with carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) and subjected to flexural actions may experience many types of failure, including FRP debonding, FRP rupture and concrete crushing. Of these different types of failure modes, FRP debonding stands out as the most predominant type of failure because of its dependence on the relatively weak bond interface between the soffit of the RC member and the FRP sheet attached to it. Many anchorage systems have been developed to enhance the performance of strengthened systems, one of which is the hybrid anchor, which combines the effects of patch anchors and spike anchors. Hybrid anchors have shown significant enhancement when used with RC members subjected to shear forces. This study explores the effectiveness of hybrid anchors in slabs subjected to flexural actions. This study reports an experimental program in which four slabs were subjected to 6-point bending tests. The results show improvement in the maximum load at failure and a significant improvement in ductility.
Moisture-induced damage is one of the primary causes of premature distress in asphalt pavements, leading to reduced service life and increased maintenance costs. Although nanomaterials have shown potential in enhancing asphalt performance, the underlying composite interaction mechanisms among nanomaterials, asphalt binder, and aggregate phases under moisture exposure are still not fully understood. In addition, comparative evaluations under consistent experimental conditions remain limited. This study investigates the influence of five nanomaterials: nano-silica (NS), nano-alumina (NA), nano-titanium dioxide (NT), nano-zinc oxide (NZ), and carbon nanotubes (CNT) on the physical and mechanical properties of asphalt binders and mixtur
... Show MorePorous asphalt paving is a modern design method that differs from the usual asphalt pavements' traditional designs. The difference is that the design structure of porous pavements allows the free passage of fluids through their layers, which controls or reduces the amount of runoff or water accumulated in the area by allowing the flow of rain and surface runoff. The cross-structure of this type of paving works as a suitable method for managing rainwater and representing groundwater recharge. The overall benefits of porous asphalt pavements include environmental services and safety features, including controlling the build-up of contaminated metals on the road surface, rainwater management, resistance to slipping ac
... Show More—Medical images have recently played a significant role in the diagnosis and detection of various diseases. Medical imaging can provide a means of direct visualization to observe through the human body and notice the small anatomical change and biological processes associated by different biological and physical parameters. To achieve a more accurate and reliable diagnosis, nowadays, varieties of computer aided detection (CAD) and computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) approaches have been established to help interpretation of the medical images. The CAD has become among the many major research subjects in diagnostic radiology and medical imaging. In this work we study the improvement in accuracy of detection of CAD system when comb
... Show MoreObjectives: Recently, there have been important advances in the clinical application of targeted hybrid near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent-radioactive tracers. ICG-99mTc-nanocolloid, for example, is already being used by some centres for sentinel lymph node biopsy in head and neck cancer. The radioactive component allows imaging at depths which would not be possible with NIR alone and, once exposed, the NIR fluorescence reporter can be imaged at very high resolution. Gamma detection is currently carried out with a separate hand-held gamma camera or with a non-imaging probe. Visualisation of NIR fluorescence during surgery requires a dedicated NIR camera, several of which are available commercially. We describe a novel hand-held hybrid NIR-gamm
... Show MoreThis paper proposes a hybrid speech enhancement estimator that integrates the Perceptually-motivated Karhunen–Loève Transform (PKLT) with the Dual-Masking Harmonic-based (DMH) algorithm in a unified framework termed PKDMH. The main novelty lies in combining perceptual subspace projection with harmonic-residual suppression, enabling the system to jointly remove noise while preserving speech-relevant spectral cues. PKLT first performs perceptual subspace projection and suppresses inaudible components, after which DMH eliminates remaining broadband and harmonic residuals. The proposed PKDMH system was evaluated using the TIMIT dataset contaminated with five noise types: White, Pink, F16, Airport, and Car noise—across five SNR leve
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