Concrete structures are exposed to aggressive environmental conditions that lead to corrosion of the embedded reinforcement and pre-stressing steel. Consequently, the safety of concrete structures may be compromised, and this requires a significant budgets to repair and maintain critical infrastructure. Prediction of structural safety can lead to significant reductions in maintenance costs by maximizing the impact of investments. The aim of this paper is to establish a framework to assess the reliability of existing post-tensioned concrete bridges. A time-dependent reliability analysis of an existing post-tensioned involving the assessment of Ynys-y-Gwas bridge has been presented in this study. The main cause of failure of this bridge was c

Characterization of the heterogonous reservoir is complex representation and evaluation of petrophysical properties and application of the relationships between porosity-permeability within the framework of hydraulic flow units is used to estimate permeability in un-cored wells. Techniques of flow unit or hydraulic flow unit (HFU) divided the reservoir into zones laterally and vertically which can be managed and control fluid flow within flow unit and considerably is entirely different with other flow units through reservoir. Each flow unit can be distinguished by applying the relationships of flow zone indicator (FZI) method. Supporting the relationship between porosity and permeability by using flow zone indictor is ca

In this research, main types of optical coatings are presented which are used as covers for solar cells, these coatings are reflect the infrared (heat) from the solar cell to increase the efficiency of the cell (because the cell’s efficiency is inversely proportional to the heat), then the theoretical and mathematical description of these optical coatings are presented, and an optical design is designed to meet this objective, its optical transmittance was calculated using (MATLAB R2008a) and (Open Filters 1.0.2) programs

In this paper, integrated quantum neural network (QNN), which is a class of feedforward

neural networks (FFNN’s), is performed through emerging quantum computing (QC) with artificial neural network(ANN) classifier. It is used in data classification technique, and here iris flower data is used as a classification signals. For this purpose independent component analysis (ICA) is used as a feature extraction technique after normalization of these signals, the architecture of (QNN’s) has inherently built in fuzzy, hidden units of these networks (QNN’s) to develop quantized representations of sample information provided by the training data set in various graded levels of certainty. Experimental results presented here show that

Even though image retrieval is considered as one of the most important research areas in the last two decades, there is still room for improvement since it is still not satisfying for many users. Two of the major problems which need to be improved are the accuracy and the speed of the image retrieval system, in order to achieve user satisfaction and also to make the image retrieval system suitable for all platforms. In this work, the proposed retrieval system uses features with spatial information to analyze the visual content of the image. Then, the feature extraction process is followed by applying the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm to reduce the search space and speed up the retrieval process. The experimental results show t

A loS.sless (reversible) data hiding (embedding) method  inside  an image  (translating medium)  - presented   in  the  present  work  using  L_SB (least  significant  bit). technique  which  enables  us to translate   data  using an  image  (host  image),  using  a  secret  key, to  be  undetectable  without losing  any  data  or  without   changing   the  size  and  the  external   scene (visible  properties) of the image, the hid-ing data is then can  be extracted (without  losing)   by reversing &n

Data hiding is the process of encoding extra information in an image by making small modification to its pixels. To be practical, the hidden data must be perceptually invisible yet robust to common signal processing operations. This paper introduces a scheme for hiding a signature image that could be as much as 25% of the host image data and hence could be used both in digital watermarking as well as image/data hiding. The proposed algorithm uses orthogonal discrete wavelet transforms with two zero moments and with improved time localization called discrete slantlet transform for both host and signature image. A scaling factor ? in frequency domain control the quality of the watermarked images. Experimental results of signature image

In this paper, the system of the power plant has been investigated as a special type of industrial systems, which has a significant role in improving societies since the electrical energy has entered all kinds of industries, and it is considered as the artery of modern life.

   The aim of this research is to construct a programming system, which could be used to identify the most important failure modes that are occur in a steam type of power plants. Also the effects and reasons of each failure mode could be analyzed through the usage of this programming system reaching to the basic events (main reasons) that causing each failure mode. The construction of this system for FMEA is dependi