loaded reinforced concrete circular short columns. An experimental investigation into the behavior
of 24 short reinforced concrete columns with and without steel fibers was carried out. The columns
had a circular section (200 mm diameter and 900 mm long). Test variables include concrete
strength, spacing of spiral reinforcement, and inclusion of steel fibers. The axial stress and axial
strains were obtained and used to evaluate the effects of the presence of steel fibers. It was found
that the addition of steel fibers slightly improves the load carrying capacity of the tested columns
whereas it significantly enhances the ductility of these specimens. Test results also indicated that for
the same confinement parameter

This work, in fact, is an English language teaching study (henceforth, ELT) which may provide the inspiration for much –needed research on issues such as testing students' level of achievement in articulatory phonetics at the university level. It attempts to answer two questions: 1)What is college students' level of achievement in articulatory phonetics? 2- Are there any statistical significant differences in the achievement of college students in articulatory phonetics between the production and recognition testing techniques? This research falls into three sections: Section one indicates the problem, the aims, the hypotheses, the procedures, the limits and the value of the study. Section two provides a general overview of the articul

Char formation is subdivided into three lithological types according to the percentage of detrital quartz and calcite (micrite and sparite), through the petrographic study of 13 thin sections collected from a section at Wadi Al-Ratgha (west of Al-Qaim, Iraq Western Desert). The three rock units are: Limy sandstone, limestone and sandy limestone. Depending on the mean gain size of detrital quartz and degree of sorting and the type of matrix, Ghar Formation can be classified in to three types, i. e. off-shore sediments with low energy environment, near shore sediments with high energy environment and mixed sediments with transitional energy environment. This is due to local transgression and regression of sea level at late lower Miocene du

This study aimed at recognizing the impact of empowerment of human resources strategy on enhancing the financial performance in working banks in Jordan, the axes of the strategy were: informative sharing, free and independence, working teams, and organizational power. To achieve the objective of the study, a questionnaire is designed and distributed on the sample of the study, which represented 60 employees of Banks. After analyzing the data by using SPSS, the study resulted that there is positive impact of empowerment of human resources strategy on enhancing the financial performance in working banks in Jordan. It suggested that the working banks in Jordan should establish database, and to create working teams.

Background: Nanotechnology represents a new science that promises to provide a broad range of uses and improved technologies for biological and biomedical applications. One of the reasons behind the intense interest is that nanotechnology permits synthesis of materials that have structure is less than 100 nanometers. The present work revealed the effect of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) on Streptococcus mutans of Human Saliva in comparison to de-ionized water. Materials and methods: Streptococcus mutans were isolated from saliva of forty eight volunteers of both sexes their age range between 18-22 years and then purified and diagnosed according to morphological characteristic and biochemical tests. Different concentrations of ZnO NPs w

Aerial manipulation of objects has a number of advantages as it is not limited by the morphology of the terrain. One of the main problems of the aerial payload process is the lack of real-time prediction of the interaction between the gripper of the aerial robot and the payload. This paper introduces a digital twin (DT) approach based on impedance control of the aerial payload transmission process. The impedance control technique is implemented to develop the target impedance based on emerging the mass of the payload and the model of the gripper fingers. Tracking the position of the interactional point between the fingers of gripper and payload, inside the impedance control, is achieved using model predictive control (MPD) approach.

This study was conducted to test the effectiveness of Agaricus bisporus inoculums (spawn) in the ratio of (0.25, 0.5 and 1%) v/v to control Pythium aphanidermatum fungus the causal agent of damping- off disease of cucumber plant. results showed the ability of A. bisporus fungus to protect the seedlings from incidence by P. aphanidermatum . all treatments of edible fungus inoculums were significantly different from pathogen treatment after 15 day of planting and there was no significant difference found from control treatment (without pathogen) . the successful of A. bisporus was continued to protect the seedlings after 30 and 45 day after planting. The numbers of seedlings were (8, 7.25 & 7.25) respectively compared to 5.5 seedlings in con

Cognitive radio technology is used to improve spectrum efficiency by having the cognitive radios act as secondary users to access primary frequency bands when they are not currently being used. In general conditions, cognitive secondary users are mobile nodes powered by battery and consuming power is one of the most important problem that facing cognitive networks; therefore, the power consumption is considered as a main constraint. In this paper, we study the performance of cognitive radio networks considering the sensing parameters as well as power constraint. The power constraint is integrated into the objective function named power efficiency which is a combination of the main system parameters of the cognitive network. We prove the exi

This paper presents a parametric audio compression scheme intended for scalable audio coding applications, and is particularly well suited for operation at low rates, in the vicinity of 5 to 32 Kbps. The model consists of two complementary components: Sines plus Noise (SN). The principal component of the system is an. overlap-add analysis-by-synthesis sinusoidal model based on conjugate matching pursuits. Perceptual information about human hearing is explicitly included into the model by psychoacoustically weighting the pursuit metric. Once analyzed, SN parameters are efficiently quantized and coded. Our informal listening tests demonstrated that our coder gave competitive performance to the-state-of-the- art HelixTM Producer Plus 9 from