A steel-concrete composite structure (1) is described. The steel-concrete composite structure comprises a steel member (2) having an upper surface (5) and a plurality of shear connector elements (6) upstanding from the upper surface and a concrete slab (4) having upper and lower surfaces (7, 8). The slab is supported on its lower surface by the upper surface of the steel member. The slab comprises a plurality of through holes (9) between the upper and lower surfaces, each through hole tapering towards the lower surface so as to form an inverted frustally-shaped seating surface (10). The concrete slab is configured and positioned with respect to the steel member such that at least one shear connector element projects into each through hole.

Recently, increasing material prices coupled with more acute environmental awareness and the implementation of regulation has driven a strong movement toward the adoption of sustainable construction technology. In the pavement industry, using low temperature asphalt mixes and recycled concrete aggregate are viewed as effective engineering solutions to address the challenges posed by climate change and sustainable development. However, to date, no research has investigated these two factors simultaneously for pavement material. This paper reports on initial work which attempts to address this shortcoming. At first, a novel treatment method is used to improve the quality of recycled concrete coarse aggregates. Thereafter, the treated recycled

The aim of the research is to investigate the effect of cold plasma on the bacteria grown on texture of sesame paste in its normal particle and nano particle size. Starting by using the image segmentation process depending on the threshold method, it is used to get rid of the reflection of the glass slides on which the sesame samples are placed.  The classification process implemented to separate the sesame paste texture from normal and abnormal texture. The abnormal texture appears when the bacteria has been grown on the sesame paste after being left for two days in the air, unsupervised k-mean classification process used to classify the infected region, the normal region and the treated region. The bacteria treated with cold plasma, t

Results of a study of alloys and films with various Pb content have been reported and discussed. Films of of thickness 1.5 μm have been deposited on glass substrates by flash thermal evaporation method at room temperature, under vacuum at constant deposition rate. These films were annealed under vacuum around 10⁻⁶Torr at different temperatures up to 523 K. The composition of the elements in alloys was determined by standard surfaces techniques such as atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF), and the results were found of high accuracy and in very good agreement with the theoretical values. The structure for alloys and films is determined by using X-ray

The map of permeability distribution in the reservoirs is considered one of the most essential steps of the geologic model building due to its governing the fluid flow through the reservoir which makes it the most influential parameter on the history matching than other parameters. For that, it is the most petrophysical properties that are tuned during the history matching. Unfortunately, the prediction of the relationship between static petrophysics (porosity) and dynamic petrophysics (permeability) from conventional wells logs has a sophisticated problem to solve by conventional statistical methods for heterogeneous formations. For that, this paper examines the ability and performance of the artificial intelligence method in perme

This paper proposes improving the structure of the neural controller based on the identification model for nonlinear systems. The goal of this work is to employ the structure of the Modified Elman Neural Network (MENN) model into the NARMA-L2 structure instead of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model in order to construct a new hybrid neural structure that can be used as an identifier model and a nonlinear controller for the SISO linear or nonlinear systems. Two learning algorithms are used to adjust the parameters weight of the hybrid neural structure with its serial-parallel configuration; the first one is supervised learning algorithm based Back Propagation Algorithm (BPA) and the second one is an intelligent algorithm n

In recent years, there has been expanding development in the vehicular part and the number of vehicles moving on the road in all the sections of the country. Vehicle number plate identification based on image processing is a dynamic area of this work; this technique is used for security purposes such as tracking of stolen cars and access control to restricted areas. The License Plate Recognition System (LPRS) exploits a digital camera to capture vehicle plate numbers is used as input to the proposed recognition system. Basically, the developing system is consist of three phases, vehicle license plate localization, character segmentation, and character recognition, the License Plate (LP) detection is presented using canny

In the present study, synthesis of bis Schiff base [I, II] by reaction of one mole of terephthalaldehyde with two mole of 2-amino-5-mercapto-1,3,4-thiadiazole or 4-amino benzene thiol in the ethanol absolute, then compounds [I,II]  were reacted with Na₂CO₃ of distilled H₂O, then chloroacetic acid was added to yield compounds [III,IV]. O-chitosan derivatives [V,VI] were synthesized by reaction of chitosan with compounds [III,IV] in acidic media in distilled water according to the steps of Fischer. O–chitosan (grafted chitosan) [V,VI] was blended with synthetic polymer polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) to produce polymers [VII,VIII], then these polymers were blended with nano: Gold or Silver by u

Image compression is a serious issue in computer storage and transmission,  that simply makes efficient use of redundancy embedded within an image itself; in addition, it may exploit human vision or perception limitations to reduce the imperceivable information Polynomial coding is a modern image compression technique based on modelling concept to remove the spatial redundancy embedded within the image effectively that composed of two parts, the  mathematical model and the residual. In this paper, two stages proposed technqies adopted, that starts by utilizing the lossy predictor model along with multiresolution base and thresholding techniques corresponding to first stage. Latter by incorporating the near lossless com