Several previous investigations and studies utilized silica fume (SF) or (micro silica) particles as supplementary cementitious material added as a substitute to cement-based mortars and their effect on the overall properties, especially on physical properties, strength properties, and mechanical properties. This study investigated the impact of the inclusion of silica fume (SF) particles on the residual compressive strengths and microstructure properties of cement-based mortars exposed to severe conditions of elevated temperatures. The prepared specimens were tested and subjected to 25, 250, 450, 600, and 900 °C. Their residual compressive strengths and microstructure were evaluated and compared with control samples (C

Correct grading of apple slices can help ensure quality and improve the marketability of the final product, which can impact the overall development of the apple slice industry post-harvest. The study intends to employ the convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures of ResNet-18 and DenseNet-201 and classical machine learning (ML) classifiers such as Wide Neural Networks (WNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), and two kernels of support vector machines (SVM) to classify apple slices into different hardness classes based on their RGB values. Our research data showed that the DenseNet-201 features classified by the SVM-Cubic kernel had the highest accuracy and lowest standard deviation (SD) among all the methods we tested, at 89.51 %  1.66 %. This

The rapid development of telemedicine services and the requirements for exchanging medical information between physicians, consultants, and health institutions have made the protection of patients’ information an important priority for any future e-health system. The protection of medical information, including the cover (i.e. medical image), has a specificity that slightly differs from the requirements for protecting other information. It is necessary to preserve the cover greatly due to its importance on the reception side as medical staff use this information to provide a diagnosis to save a patient's life. If the cover is tampered with, this leads to failure in achieving the goal of telemedicine. Therefore, this work provides an in

Optimizing the Access Point (AP) deployment has a great role in wireless applications due to the need for providing an efficient communication with low deployment costs. Quality of Service (QoS), is a major significant parameter and objective to be considered along with AP placement as well the overall deployment cost. This study proposes and investigates a multi-level optimization algorithm called Wireless Optimization Algorithm for Indoor Placement (WOAIP) based on Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO). WOAIP aims to obtain the optimum AP multi-floor placement with effective coverage that makes it more capable of supporting QoS and cost-effectiveness. Five pairs (coverage, AP deployment) of weights, signal thresholds and received s

The load shedding  scheme has been extensively implemented as a fast solution for unbalance conditions. Therefore, it's crucial to investigate supply-demand balancing in order to protect the network from collapsing and to sustain stability as possible, however its implementation is mostly undesirable. One of the solutions to minimize the amount of load shedding is the integration renewable energy  resources, such as wind power, in the electric power generation could contribute significantly to minimizing power cuts as it is ability to positively improving the stability of the electric grid. In this paper propose a method for shedding the load base on the priority demands with incorporating the wind po

The demand for single photon sources in quantum key distribution (QKD) systems has necessitated the use of weak coherent pulses (WCPs) characterized by a Poissonian distribution. Ensuring security against eavesdropping attacks requires keeping the mean photon number (µ) small and known to legitimate partners. However, accurately determining µ poses challenges due to discrepancies between theoretical calculations and practical implementation. This paper introduces two experiments. The first experiment involves theoretical calculations of µ using several filters to generate the WCPs. The second experiment utilizes a variable attenuator to generate the WCPs, and the value of µ was estimated from the photons detected by the BB

In this work, an optical fiber biomedical sensor for detecting the ratio of the hemoglobin in the blood is presented. A surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based coreless optical fiber was developed and implemented using single- and multi-mode optical fibers. The sensor is also utilized to evaluate refractive indices and concentrations of hemoglobin in blood samples, with 40 nm thickness of (20 nm Au and 20 nm Ag) to increase the sensitivity. It is found in practice that when the sensitive refractive index increases, the resonant wavelength increases due to the decrease in energy.

The emphasis of Master Production Scheduling (MPS) or tactic planning is on time and spatial disintegration of the cumulative planning targets and forecasts, along with the provision and forecast of the required resources. This procedure eventually becomes considerably difficult and slow as the number of resources, products and periods considered increases. A number of studies have been carried out to understand these impediments and formulate algorithms to optimise the production planning problem, or more specifically the master production scheduling (MPS) problem. These algorithms include an Evolutionary Algorithm called Genetic Algorithm, a Swarm Intelligence methodology called Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA), Bat Algorithm (BAT), T

The university course timetable problem (UCTP) is typically a combinatorial optimization problem. Manually achieving a useful timetable requires many days of effort, and the results are still unsatisfactory. unsatisfactory. Various states of art methods (heuristic, meta-heuristic) are used to satisfactorily solve UCTP. However, these approaches typically represent the instance-specific solutions. The hyper-heuristic framework adequately addresses this complex problem. This research proposed Particle Swarm Optimizer-based Hyper Heuristic (HH PSO) to solve UCTP efficiently. PSO is used as a higher-level method that selects low-level heuristics (LLH) sequence which further generates an optimal solution. The proposed a