The conception and experimental assessment of a removable friction-based shear connector (FBSC) for precast steel-concrete composite bridges is presented. The FBSC uses pre-tensioned high-strength steel bolts that pass through countersunk holes drilled on the top flange of the steel beam. Pre-tensioning of the bolts provides the FBSC with significant frictional resistance that essentially prevents relative slip displacement of the concrete slab with respect to the steel beam under service loading. The countersunk holes are grouted to prevent sudden slip of the FBSC when friction resistance is exceeded. Moreover, the FBSC promotes accelerated bridge construction by fully exploiting prefabrication, does not raise issues relevant to precast co

Rapid and accurate identification of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus is essential in limiting the spread of this bacterium. The aim of study is the detection of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and determining their susceptibility to some antimicrobial agent. A total of fifty clinical Staphylococcus aureus, isolated from the nose of health work staff in surgery unit of Kalar general hospital and from ear of patients attended to the same hospital. The susceptibilities of isolates were determined by the disc diffusion method with oxacillin (1 ?g) and cefoxitin (30 ?g), and by the mannitol salt agar supplemented with cefoxitin (MSA-CFOX), susceptibilities of isolates to other antimicrobial agent were determined b

The derivatives formed after the successive acetylation, esterification and nitration reactions to cholic, deoxycholic, and taurocholic acids were identified to be of the following general strucure: Colt, Where RI=NO3, OH, 0=, or CH3COO. R2=H, NO3, OH, 0-=, or CH3COO. R3=H, NO3,01-1, 0=, or CH3COO. R4=OH, NH(CH2)2S03Na, NH(CH2)2S03H, or OMe. By using U.V-visible and I.R spectrophotometry . The number of hydroxyl groups was determined, purity was checked from T.L.C, Most of these derivatives will find pharmaceutical application.

Identifying people by their ear has recently received import attention in the literature. The accurate segmentation of the ear region is vital in order to make successful person identification decisions. This paper presents an effective approach for ear region segmentation from color ear images. Firstly, the RGB color model was converted to the HSV color model. Secondly, thresholding was utilized to segment the ear region. Finally, the morphological operations were applied to remove small islands and fill the gaps. The proposed method was tested on a database which consisted of 105 ear images taken from the right sides of 105 subjects. The experimental results of the proposed approach on a variety of ear images revealed that this approac

Radioactive liquid waste contaminated with cesium-137 found in the radiochemistry laboratories at Tuwaitha site, south of Baghdad, was treated in this work. Bentonite was used as a sorbent material for the removal of radioactive cesium-137 from liquid waste by ion exchange method. The results indicated that the best removal efficiency obtained was 95.13% with experimental conditions of 2 h mixture time, 0.04 g sorbent mass, and pH=10 for the radioactive liquid. It was found that the experimental results match well with Langmuir and Freundlich models, with better matching with the latter.

The esterification of oleic acid with 2-ethylhexanol in presence of sulfuric acid  as homogeneous catalyst was investigated in this work to produce 2-ethylhexyl oleate (biodiesel) by using semi batch reactive distillation. The effect of reaction temperature (100 to 130°C), 2-ethylhexanol:oleic acid molar ratio (1:1 to 1:3) and catalysts concentration (0.2 to 1wt%) were studied. Higher conversion of 97% was achieved with operating conditions of reaction temperature of 130°C, molar ratio of free fatty acid to alcohol of 1:2 and catalyst concentration of 1wt%. A simulation was adopted from basic principles of the reactive distillation using MATLAB to describe the process. Good agreement was achieved.