In this study, six square reinforced concrete flat plates with dimensions of (1500×1500×100) mm were tested under a concentrated load applied on a column located at the center of the slabs. One of these slabs was the control specimen, whereas, in the others, steel angles (steel collars) were used, fixed at the connection region between the slab and the column to investigate the effect of the presence of these collars on punching shear strength. Five thicknesses were used (4, 5, 6, 8, 10mm) with constant legs of angles (75×75) mm of the steel collars to investigate the effects on the punching shear resistance with respect to the control slab. The results of the experimental study show that the punching shear resistance increased b

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has become one of the most common chronic liver diseases worldwide, which characterized by steatosis, inflammation, and fibrosis. The aim of this designed study is to evaluate the ability of guggulsterone to prevent high fat diet induced steatohepatitis in mice. Five groups of male mice were selected and treated as the following: group I, mice had free access to standard commercial diet and considered as control group, group II, mice were fed a specially formulated high-fat diet for 12 weeks to induce non-alcoholic liver disease, while groups III, IV and V the mice were administered high fat diet containing guggulsterone at 500, 1000 and 2000 ppm concentration respectively for 12 weeks. Maintaini

High performance self-consolidating concrete HP-SCC is one of the most complex types of concrete which have the capacity to consolidated under its own weight, have excellent homogeneity and high durability. This study aims to focus on the possibility of using industrial by-products like Silica fumes SF in the preparation of HP-SCC enhanced with discrete steel fibers (DSF) and monofilament polypropylene fibers (PPF). From experimental results, it was found that using DSF with volume fraction of 0.50 %; a highly improvements were gained in the mechanical properties of HP-SCC. The compressive strength, splitting tensile strength, flexural strength and elastic modulus improved about 65.7 %, 70.5 %, 41.7 % and 80.3 % at 28 days age, respectively

Recently, the development and application of the hydrological models based on Geographical Information System (GIS) has increased around the world. One of the most important applications of GIS is mapping the Curve Number (CN) of a catchment. In this research, three softwares, such as an ArcView GIS 9.3 with ArcInfo, Arc Hydro Tool and Geospatial Hydrologic Modeling Extension (Hec-GeoHMS) model for ArcView GIS 9.3, were used to calculate CN of (19210 ha) Salt Creek watershed (SC) which is located in Osage County, Oklahoma, USA. Multi layers were combined and examined using the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) ArcMap 2009. These layers are soil layer (Soil Survey Geographic SSURGO), 30 m x 30 m resolution of Digital Elevati

This research aims to distinguish the reef environment from the non-reef environment. The Oligocene-Miocene-succussion in western Iraq was selected as a case study, represented by the reefal limestone facies of the Anah Formation (Late Oligocene) deposited in reef-back reef environments, dolomitic limestone of the Euphrates Formation (Early Miocene) deposited in open sea environments, and gypsiferous marly limestone of the Fatha Formation (Middle Miocene) deposited in a lagoonal environment. The content of the rare earth elements (REEs) (La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Er, Ho, Tm, Yb, Lu, and Y) in reef facies appear to be much lower than of those in the non-reef facies. The open sea facies have a low content of REEs due to bein

<span>Digital audio is required to transmit large sizes of audio information through the most common communication systems; in turn this leads to more challenges in both storage and archieving. In this paper, an efficient audio compressive scheme is proposed, it depends on combined transform coding scheme; it is consist of i) bi-orthogonal (tab 9/7) wavelet transform to decompose the audio signal into low &amp; multi high sub-bands, ii) then the produced sub-bands passed through DCT to de-correlate the signal, iii) the product of the combined transform stage is passed through progressive hierarchical quantization, then traditional run-length encoding (RLE), iv) and finally LZW coding to generate the output mate bitstream.

In this study, a fast block matching search algorithm based on blocks' descriptors and multilevel blocks filtering is introduced. The used descriptors are the mean and a set of centralized low order moments. Hierarchal filtering and MAE similarity measure were adopted to nominate the best similar blocks lay within the pool of neighbor blocks. As next step to blocks nomination the similarity of the mean and moments is used to classify the nominated blocks and put them in one of three sub-pools, each one represents certain nomination priority level (i.e., most, less & least level). The main reason of the introducing nomination and classification steps is a significant reduction in the number of matching instances of the pixels belong to the c

The aim of this research is to compare traditional and modern methods to obtain the optimal solution using dynamic programming and intelligent algorithms to solve the problems of project management.

It shows the possible ways in which these problems can be addressed, drawing on a schedule of interrelated and sequential activities And clarifies the relationships between the activities to determine the beginning and end of each activity and determine the duration and cost of the total project and estimate the times used by each activity and determine the objectives sought by the project through planning, implementation and monitoring to maintain the budget assessed