In Australia, most of the existing buildings were designed before the release of the Australian standard for earthquake actions in 2007. Therefore, many existing buildings in Australia lack adequate seismic design, and their seismic performance must be assessed. The recent earthquake that struck Mansfield, Victoria near Melbourne elevated the need to produce fragility curves for existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Australia. Fragility curves are frequently utilized to assess buildings’ seismic performance and it is defined as the demand probability surpassing capacity at a given intensity level. Numerous factors can influence the results of the fragility assessment of RC buildings. Among the most important factors that can affe

The present study was set to demonstrate the prevalence of toxoplasmosis infection and its effects on patients with systemic  lupus erythematosus (SLE) through determining their serum levels of anti-dsDNA and IL-18 antibodies. For this purpose, the sera from 132 SLE and/or toxoplasmosis patients and 30 healthy women, were collected. The study sample was divided into four groups of SLE, toxoplasmosis, SLE coinfected with toxoplasmosis, and healthy control. Anti-Toxoplasma IgG antibodies were examined for all the samples using ELISA kit. The results showed a high mean level of anti-Toxoplasma IgG among SLE patients coinfected with toxoplasmosis (104.8792±12.31585pg/ml) in comparison to that in toxoplasmosis patients (91.1705±12.577

Tool wear is a major problem in machining operations because the resulting material loss gradually changes of the machine tool. There many factors may leads to material loss like; friction, corrosion, and also it’s happened by rubbing during machining processes between the work piece and the tool. Dimensional accuracy of the work piece, and also the surface finish will be reducing by tool wear. It can also increase cutting force. In this study, we focused on the effect of the coating process on crater wear problems. Crater wear is caused by the flow between the chip and the rake face of the tool, whereas flank wear is caused by the contact between the tool and the work piece. In reducing crater wear, aluminum titanium nitride (AlTiN) u

One of the most important phenomenon that occurs in sheet metal forming processes is the spring-back, which causes several geometrical alterations in the parts. The accurate prediction of springback after bending unloading is the key to the tool design, operation control, and precision estimate concerning the part geometry. This study investigated experimentally the effect of pretension in three rolling direction (0, 90, 45 degree) on the springback behavior of the yellow brass, sheet under V shape bending die. The pre-tension ranges from five different levels starting of 11% to 55% from the total strain in each rolling direction by regular increase of 11 %, then bent on a V-die 90 degree for the springback estimate. From experiment the

The study aimed to identify the reality of the application of the organizational equity empowerment at the Jordanian government institutions from the viewpoint of women employees in terms of each of the (delegation equity, training equity, appraisal equity, join in committees equity, participation in decision-making equity), and the impact of non-application of equity empowerment on performance.

Population of the study amounted (986) women employee, while the researcher distributed (340) questionnaire through a randomly sample method.

The study used the questionnaire as a tool to collect the data. And to ensure the reliability of the questionnaire has been calculated Cronbach's co

Nitinol (NiTi) is used in many medical applications, including hard tissue replacements, because of its suitable characteristics, including a close elastic modulus to that of bones. Due to the great importance of the mechanical properties of this material in tissue replacements, this work aims to study the hysteresis response in an attempt to explore the ability of the material to remember its previous mechanical state in addition to its ability to withstand stress and to obtain the optimal dimensions and specifications for the manufacturer of NiTi actuators. Stress-strain examination is done in a computational way using a mutable Lagoudas MATLAB code for various coil radii, environment temperatures, and coil lengths. The computational m

Background: Human semen contains high concentrations of fructose, zinc (Zn) and copper (Cu) in bound and ionic forms for Zn and Cu. The presence of abnormal levels of fructose and those trace elements may affect spermatogenesis with regard to production, maturation, motility and fertilizing capacity of the spermatozoa.Objective: To evaluate the levels of fructose, Zn and Cu in seminal plasma in different groups of male infertility and to correlate their concentrations with various sperm parameters.Methods: The concentrations of fructose, Zn and Cu were measured in 114 semen samples from normozoospermic, oligozoospermic, astheno-zoospermic, and azoospermic men using the electrothermal-atomic absorption spectrometry for Zn and Cu determinatio

The effect of the concentration of the colloidal nanomaterial on their optical limiting behavior is reported in this paper. The colloids of sliver nanoparticles in deionized water were chemically prepared for the two concentrations (31 ppm and 11ppm). Two cw lasers (473 nm Blue DPSS laser and 532 nm Nd:YAG laser) are used to compare the optical limiting performance for the samples. UV–visible spectrophotometer, transmission electron microscope (TEM) and Fourier Transformation Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR) were used to obtain the characteristics of the sample. The nonlinear refractive index was calculated to be in the order of 10-9 cm2/W. The results demonstrate that the observed limiting response is significant for 532nm. In addition, t