A novel demountable shear connector for precast steel-concrete composite bridges is presented. The connector uses high-strength steel bolts, which are fastened to the top flange of the steel beam with the aid of a special locking nut configuration that prevents bolts from slipping within their holes. Moreover, the connector promotes accelerated construction and overcomes the typical construction tolerance issues of precast structures. Most importantly, the connector allows bridge disassembly. Therefore, it can address different bridge deterioration scenarios with minimum disturbance to traffic flow including the following: (1) precast deck panels can be rapidly uplifted and replaced; (2) connectors can be rapidly removed and replaced; and (

Affinity is a term used to describe the amount of the adhesion bond between asphalt binder and aggregate. Adhesion force may be used as indicator to the amount of energy or work required to breakdown the adhesive bond between asphalt binder and aggregate. In order to study affinity between asphalt binder and aggregate, a modified device is manufacture locally similar to Rolling Bottle Test (RBT) to Predicted the degree of affinity between asphalt binder and aggregate; taking into consideration mineral composition with physical properties of asphalt binder to measure required force to separate asphalt binder from aggregate surface. In this study, suggest new parameters to represent the stripping or affinity phenomena (aff

The current, research, aims, to, verify, the relationship between talent development practices and organizational performance through a mediating role of creative organizational climate at the Institution of Industrial Development and Research- the Iraqi Industry Ministry. The descriptive and analytic approach was adopted as a research design. The research sample was represented by a number of managers and employees who work at the middle management level. The researchers used the questionnaire as the main method for collecting data to achieve the main research objective. It was distributed 162 questionnaires, of which 146 received; and then all of those were used on the final statistical analysis. The sample response-rate rate w

The present work is an attempt to develop design data for an Iraqi roof and wall constructions using the latest ASHRAE Radiant Time Series (RTS) cooling load calculation method. The work involves calculation of cooling load theoretically by introducing the design data for Iraq, and verifies the results experimentally by field measurements. Technical specifications of Iraqi construction materials are used to derive the conduction time factors that needed in RTS method calculations. Special software published by Oklahoma state university is used to extract the conduction factors according to the technical specifications of Iraqi construction materials.  Good agreement between the average theoretical and measured cooli

The effect of using grinded rocks of (quartzite and porcelanite) as powder of (10 and 20) % replacement by weight of cement for self-compacting concrete slabs was investigated in this study. Five slabs with 15 concrete cubes were tested experimentally at 28 days to study the compressive strength, ultimate load, ultimate deflection, ductility, crack load and steel strain. The test results show that, the compressive strength improvement when replacement of local rock powder reached to (7.3, 4.22) % for (10 and 20) % quartzite powder and (11.3, 16.1) % for (10 and 20) % porcelanite powder, respectively compared to the reference specimen. The ultimate load percentage increase for slabs with (10 and 20) % rep

Numeral recognition is considered an essential preliminary step for optical character recognition, document understanding, and others. Although several handwritten numeral recognition algorithms have been proposed so far, achieving adequate recognition accuracy and execution time remain challenging to date. In particular, recognition accuracy depends on the features extraction mechanism. As such, a fast and robust numeral recognition method is essential, which meets the desired accuracy by extracting the features efficiently while maintaining fast implementation time. Furthermore, to date most of the existing studies are focused on evaluating their methods based on clean environments, thus limiting understanding of their potential a

Image quality plays a vital role in improving and assessing image compression performance. Image compression represents big image data to a new image with a smaller size suitable for storage and transmission. This paper aims to evaluate the implementation of the hybrid techniques-based tensor product mixed transform. Compression and quality metrics such as compression-ratio (CR), rate-distortion (RD), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and Structural Content (SC) are utilized for evaluating the hybrid techniques. Then, a comparison between techniques is achieved according to these metrics to estimate the best technique. The main contribution is to improve the hybrid techniques. The proposed hybrid techniques are consisting of discrete wavel

thirty adult NewZealand rabbits used in this study, they were divided in to two groups (control and treaded with Helium — Neon laser). A square skin flap done on the medial aspect of the auricle of both sides, a square piece of cartilage incised, pealed out from each auricle and fixed in the site of the other, then the flaps sutured .The site of the operation in the rabbits of the treated group were irradiated using a Helium —Neon laser with (5mw) power for (10 days) began after the operation directly, (3 rabbits) from each group used for collection of specimens for histopathological examination at the weeks (1,2,3,4, & 6) weeks post the operation .The results revealed Early invasion of the matrix with elastic fibers which continue to t

In recent years, with the rapid development of the current classification system in digital content identification, automatic classification of images has become the most challenging task in the field of computer vision. As can be seen, vision is quite challenging for a system to automatically understand and analyze images, as compared to the vision of humans. Some research papers have been done to address the issue in the low-level current classification system, but the output was restricted only to basic image features. However, similarly, the approaches fail to accurately classify images. For the results expected in this field, such as computer vision, this study proposes a deep learning approach that utilizes a deep learning algorithm.