This article presents the results of an experimental investigation of using carbon fiber–reinforced polymer sheets to enhance the behavior of reinforced concrete deep beams with large web openings in shear spans. A set of 18 specimens were fabricated and tested up to a failure to evaluate the structural performance in terms of cracking, deformation, and load-carrying capacity. All tested specimens were with 1500-mm length, 500-mm cross-sectional deep, and 150-mm wide. Parameters that studied were opening size, opening location, and the strengthening factor. Two deep beams were implemented as control specimens without opening and without strengthening. Eight deep beams were fabricated with openings but without strengthening, while the other eight deep beams were with openings in shear spans and with carbon fiber–reinforced polymer sheet strengthening around opening zones. The opening size was adopted to be 200 × 200 mm dimensions in eight deep beams, while it was considered to be 230 × 230 mm dimensions in the other eight specimens. In eight specimens the opening was located at the center of the shear span, while in the other eight beams the opening was attached to the interior edge of the shear span. Carbon fiber–reinforced polymer sheets were installed around openings to compensate for the cutout area of concrete. Results gained from the experimental test showed that the creation of openings in shear spans affect the load-carrying capacity, where the reduction of the failure load for specimens with the opening but without strengthening may attain 66% compared to deep beams without openings. On the other hand, the strengthening by carbon fiber–reinforced polymer sheets for beams with openings increased the failure load by 20%–47% compared with the identical deep beam without strengthening. A significant contribution of carbon fiber–reinforced polymer sheets in restricting the deformability of deep beams was observed.
This study concerns the role of activated carbon (AC) from palm raceme as a support material for the enhancement of lipase-catalyzed reactions in an aqueous solution, with deep eutectic solvent (DES) as a co-solvent. The effects of carbonization temperature, impregnation ratio, and carbonization time on lipase activity were studied. The activities of Amano lipase from Burkholderia cepacia (AML) and lipase from the porcine pancreas (PPL) were used to investigate the optimum conditions for AC preparation. The results showed that AC has more interaction with PPL and effectively provides greater enzymatic activity compared with AML. The optimum treatment conditions of AC samples that yield the highest enzymatic activity were 0.5 (NaOH (
... Show MoreHydrate dissociation equilibrium conditions for carbon dioxide + methane with water, nitrogen + methane with water and carbon dioxide + nitrogen with water were measured using cryogenic sapphire cell. Measurements were performed in the temperature range of 275.75 K–293.95 K and for pressures ranging from 5 MPa to 25 MPa. The resulting data indicate that as the carbon dioxide concentration is increased in the gas mixture, the gas hydrate equilibrium temperature increases. In contrast, by increasing the nitrogen concentration in the gas mixtures containing methane or carbon dioxide decreased the gas hydrate equilibrium temperatures. Furthermore, the cage occupancies for the carbon dioxide + methane system were evaluated using the Van der Wa
... Show MoreUnconfined compressive strength (UCS) of rock is the most critical geomechanical property widely used as input parameters for designing fractures, analyzing wellbore stability, drilling programming and carrying out various petroleum engineering projects. The USC regulates rock deformation by measuring its strength and load-bearing capacity. The determination of UCS in the laboratory is a time-consuming and costly process. The current study aims to develop empirical equations to predict UCS using regression analysis by JMP software for the Khasib Formation in the Buzurgan oil fields, in southeastern Iraq using well-log data. The proposed equation accuracy was tested using the coefficient of determination (R²), the average absolute
... Show MoreBackground: The most widely used material for fabrication of denture base is poly methyl methacrylate, despite its popularity, the main problems associated with it as a denture base material are poor strength particularly under fatigue failure inside the patient mouth, impact failure outside the patient mouth, which are the main causes for fracture of denture, several studies was done to increase mechanical properties of denture base. The present study was conducted to evaluate and compare the effect of addition single walled carbon nanotubes in different concentrations to polymethyl methacrylate on some mechanical properties (surface hardness, surface roughness, impact strength and transverse strength). Materials and methods: Forty eight
... Show MoreThe convolutional neural networks (CNN) are among the most utilized neural networks in various applications, including deep learning. In recent years, the continuing extension of CNN into increasingly complicated domains has made its training process more difficult. Thus, researchers adopted optimized hybrid algorithms to address this problem. In this work, a novel chaotic black hole algorithm-based approach was created for the training of CNN to optimize its performance via avoidance of entrapment in the local minima. The logistic chaotic map was used to initialize the population instead of using the uniform distribution. The proposed training algorithm was developed based on a specific benchmark problem for optical character recog
... Show MoreGeneral Background: Deep image matting is a fundamental task in computer vision, enabling precise foreground extraction from complex backgrounds, with applications in augmented reality, computer graphics, and video processing. Specific Background: Despite advancements in deep learning-based methods, preserving fine details such as hair and transparency remains a challenge. Knowledge Gap: Existing approaches struggle with accuracy and efficiency, necessitating novel techniques to enhance matting precision. Aims: This study integrates deep learning with fusion techniques to improve alpha matte estimation, proposing a lightweight U-Net model incorporating color-space fusion and preprocessing. Results: Experiments using the AdobeComposition-1k
... Show MoreRegarding to the computer system security, the intrusion detection systems are fundamental components for discriminating attacks at the early stage. They monitor and analyze network traffics, looking for abnormal behaviors or attack signatures to detect intrusions in early time. However, many challenges arise while developing flexible and efficient network intrusion detection system (NIDS) for unforeseen attacks with high detection rate. In this paper, deep neural network (DNN) approach was proposed for anomaly detection NIDS. Dropout is the regularized technique used with DNN model to reduce the overfitting. The experimental results applied on NSL_KDD dataset. SoftMax output layer has been used with cross entropy loss funct
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