Deep beams are used in wide construction fields such as water tanks, foundations, and girders in multi-story buildings to provide certain areas free of columns. In practice it is quite often occurring to create web opening in deep beams to supply convenient passage of ventilation ducts, cable channels, gas and water pipes. Experimental studies of ten 10 deep beams were carried out, where two of them are control specimens without openings and eight with large web openings in the shear spans. The variables that have been adopted are the ratio of the shear span to the overall depth of the member cross-section, location and dimensions of the opening. Test results showed that there was a decrease in the load carrying capacity of deep beams with openings compared to the control deep beams. This reduction may reach 66% in particular cases. It is clear that, the position of opening in shear span has less effect on the performance of structural concrete deep beams at different serviceability stages. Only 11% increase in load capacity at failure was observed in specimens with openings adjacent to the interior edges of shear spans in comparison with specimens with openings at the center of shear span because the discontinuity of the load path is less. Also the midspan deflection at service load level of the reference beam in specimens with openings adjacent to interior edge of shear spans was less than the midspan deflection of reference specimens by 10% - 33%. Evaluating all these advantages facilitates to recommend, if it is very required, the creation of openings at the interior edges of shear spans of the structural concrete deep beams.
Bendable concrete, also known as Engineered Cementitious Composite (ECC) is a type of ultra-ductile cementitious composites reinforced with fibres to control the width of cracks. It has the ability to enhance concrete flexibility by withstanding strains of 3% and higher. The properties of bendable concrete mixes (compressive strength, flexural strength, and drying shrinkage) are here assessed after the incorporation of supplementary cementitious materials, silica fume, polymer fibres, and the use of ordinary Portland cement (O.P.C) and Portland limestone cement (IL). Mixes with Portland limestone cement show lower drying shrinkage and lower compressive and flexural strength than mixes with ordinary Portland cement, due to the ratio o
... Show MoreWith the fast-growing of neural machine translation (NMT), there is still a lack of insight into the performance of these models on semantically and culturally rich texts, especially between linguistically distant languages like Arabic and English. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two state-of-the-art AI translation systems (ChatGPT, DeepSeek) when translating Arabic texts to English in three different genres: journalistic, literary, and technical. The study utilizes a mixed-method evaluation methodology based on a balanced corpus of 60 Arabic source texts from the three genres. Objective measures, including BLEU and TER, and subjective evaluations from human translators were employed to determine the semantic, contextual an
... Show MoreThis study experimentally investigated Free-Fall Gravity Drainage (FFGD) under combination-drive conditions in a two-dimensional Hele-Shaw model representing a water-drive reservoir. An initially high gravity potential from the oil column enabled early oil drainage before aquifer support became dominant. Three water-drive strengths were tested, demonstrating that a stronger aquifer (1.15 psig) accelerated oil recovery to approximately 75% of the original oil in place (OOIP) within 60 minutes, resulting in a final recovery of 79.5%. However, this was accompanied by rapid water breakthrough after 2.5 minutes and high-water cuts exceeding 90%. In contrast, a weaker aquifer (0.725 psig) stabilized the oil–water contact, delaying w
... Show MoreCastellated columns are structural members that are created by breaking a rolled column along the center-line by flame after that rejoining the equivalent halves by welding such that for better structural strength against axial loading, the total column depth is increased by around 50 percent. The implementation of these institutional members will also contribute to significant economies of material value. The main objectives of this study are to study the enhancement of the load-carrying capacity of castellated columns with encasement of the columns by Reactive Powder Concrete (RPC) and lacing reinforcement, and serviceability of the confined castellated columns. The Castellated columns with RPC and Lacing Reinforcement improve com
... Show MoreIn this study, the flexural performance of a new composite beam–slab system filled with concrete material was investigated, where this system was mainly prepared from lightweight cold-formed steel sections of a beam and a deck slab for carrying heavy floor loads as another concept of a conventional composite system with a lower cost impact. For this purpose, seven samples of a profile steel sheet–dry board deck slab (PSSDB/PDS) carried by a steel cold-formed C-purlins beam (CB) were prepared and named “composite CBPDS specimen”, which were tested under a static bending load. Specifically, the effects of the profile steel sheet (PSS) direction (parallel or perpendicular to the span of the specimen) using different C-purlins c
... Show MoreThe bubbled slab, a type of reinforced concrete (RC) slab with plastic voids, is an innovative design that employs a biaxial distribution of voiding formers within the slab to reduce the slab’s self-weight while preserving a load-carrying capacity that is approximately comparable to that of solid slabs. This paper presents a new approach for figuring out the effective critical shear perimeter of voided slabs using the reduced-volume concept of concrete. This approach aims to reduce the coefficient of variation of the current design standards, namely the ACI 318-19 and Eurocode 2, for assessing the slabs’ resistance to punching shear. Our experimental program investigated the impact of voiding former patterns and the location of
... Show MoreIn the present work a theoretical analysis depending on the new higher order . element in shear deformation theory for simply supported cross-ply laminated plate is developed. The new displacement field of the middle surface expanded as a combination of exponential and trigonometric function of thickness coordinate with the transverse displacement taken to be constant through the thickness. The governing equations are derived using Hamilton’s principle and solved using Navier solution method to obtain the deflection and stresses under uniform sinusoidal load. The effect of many design parameters such as number of laminates, aspect ratio and thickness ratio on static behavior of the laminated composite plate has been studied. The
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