In this study, three strengthening techniques, near-surface mounted NSM-CRFP, NSM-CFRP with externally bonding EB-CFRP, and hybrid CFRP with circularization were studied to increase the seismic performance of existing RC slender columns under lateral loads. Experimentally, 1:3 scale RC models were studied and subjected to both lateral static load and seismic excitation. In the dynamic test, a model was subjected to El Centro 1940 NS earthquake excitation by using a shaking table. According to the test results, the strengthening techniques showed a significant increase in load carrying capacity, of about 86.6%, and 46.6%, for circularization and NSM-CFRP respectively, of the reference unstrengthened columns. On the other hand, columns strengthened with hybrid NSM-CFRP and EB-CFRP showed a different failure mode. Dynamically, the lateral drift was decreased by about 75%, 47%, and 49% for earthquake amplitudes of 0.05g, 0.15g, and 0.32g respectively. Finally, it was concluded, depending on the static and dynamic analyses, that the circularization process showed a significant increase in lateral load-bearing capacity.
This article investigates the development of the following material properties of concrete with time: compressive strength, tensile strength, modulus of elasticity, and fracture energy. These properties were determined at seven different hydration ages (18 h, 30 h, 48 h, 72 h, 7 days, 14 days, 28 days) for four pure cement concrete mixes totaling 336 specimens tested throughout the study. Experimental data obtained were used to assess the relationship of the above properties with the concrete compressive strength and how these relationships are affected with age. Further, this study investigates prediction models available in literature and recommendations are made for models that are found suitable for application to early age conc
... Show MoreThe currency in circulation is a key element of the monetary supply system of the Iraqi economy because itreflects the level of economic activity and the liquidity level in the market. It can be expressed as an important tool when formulating monetary policy. This research aims to analyze and forecast the behavior of the currency in circulation in Iraq using the ARMA-GARCH model for monthly data from 2004 to 2025 to understand the dynamics of monetary liquidity, The sample was divided into two parts: approximately 80% for the training set (2004-2021), and approximately 20% for the testing set (2022-2025). Data were analyzed in Python using many packages. The results showed that the time series was initially non-stationary but became
... 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
... Show MoreIn this paper, a new hybrid algorithm for linear programming model based on Aggregate production planning problems is proposed. The new hybrid algorithm of a simulated annealing (SA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms. PSO algorithm employed for a good balance between exploration and exploitation in SA in order to be effective and efficient (speed and quality) for solving linear programming model. Finding results show that the proposed approach is achieving within a reasonable computational time comparing with PSO and SA algorithms.
In this paper, the problem of resource allocation at Al-Raji Company for soft drinks and juices was studied. The company produces several types of tasks to produce juices and soft drinks, which need machines to accomplish these tasks, as it has 6 machines that want to allocate to 4 different tasks to accomplish these tasks. The machines assigned to each task are subject to failure, as these machines are repaired to participate again in the production process. From past records of the company, the probability of failure machines at each task was calculated depending on company data information. Also, the time required for each machine to complete each task was recorded. The aim of this paper is to determine the minimum expected ti
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