Shallow foundations are usually used for structures with light to moderate loads where the soil underneath can carry them. In some cases, soil strength and/or other properties are not adequate and require improvement using one of the ground improvement techniques. Stone column is one of the common improvement techniques in which a column of stone is installed vertically in clayey soils. Stone columns are usually used to increase soil strength and to accelerate soil consolidation by acting as vertical drains. Many researches have been done to estimate the behavior of the improved soil. However, none of them considered the effect of stone column geometry on the behavior of the circular footing. In this research, finite ele

The manifestations of climate change are increasing with the days: sudden rains and floods, lakes that evaporate, rivers that experience unprecedentedly low water levels, and successive droughts such as the Tigris, Euphrates, Rhine, and Lape rivers. At the same time, energy consumption is increasing, and there is no way to stop the warming of the Earth's atmosphere despite the many conferences and growing interest in environmental problems. An aspect that has not received sufficient attention is the tremendous heat produced by human activities. This work links four elements in the built environment that are known for their high energy consumption (houses, supermarkets, greenhouses, and asphalt roads) according t

In this paper, a robust invisible watermarking system for digital video encoded by MPEG-4 is presented. The proposed scheme provides watermark hidden by embedding a secret message (watermark) in the sprite area allocated in reference frame (I-frame). The proposed system consists of two main units: (i) Embedding unit and (ii) Extraction unit. In the embedding unit, the system allocates the sprite blocks using motion compensation information. The allocated sprite area in each I–frame is used as hosting area for embedding watermark data. In the extraction unit, the system extracts the watermark data in order to check authentication and ownership of the video. The watermark data embedding method is Blocks average modulation applied on RGB dom

<p>Generally, The sending process of secret information via the transmission channel or any carrier medium is not secured. For this reason, the techniques of information hiding are needed. Therefore, steganography must take place before transmission. To embed a secret message at optimal positions of the cover image under spatial domain, using the developed particle swarm optimization algorithm (Dev.-PSO) to do that purpose in this paper based on Least Significant Bits (LSB) using LSB substitution. The main aim of (Dev. -PSO) algorithm is determining an optimal paths to reach a required goals in the specified search space based on disposal of them, using (Dev.-PSO) algorithm produces the paths of a required goals with most effi

In this research the hard chromium electroplating process, which is one of the common methods of overlay coating was used, by using chromium acid as source of chromium and sulphuric acid as catalyst since the ratio between chromic acid and sulphuric acid is (100 : 1) consequently. Plating process was made by applying current of density (40 Amp / dm²) and the range of solution temperature was (50 – 55^oC) with different time periods (1-5 hr). A  low carbon steel type (Ck₁₅) was used as substrate for hard chromium electroplating. Solid carburization was carried out for hard chromium plating specimen at temperature (925^oC) with time duration (2 hr) to be followed with quenching and tempering

This paper is concerned with finding solutions to free-boundary inverse coefficient problems. Mathematically, we handle a one-dimensional non-homogeneous heat equation subject to initial and boundary conditions as well as non-localized integral observations of zeroth and first-order heat momentum. The direct problem is solved for the temperature distribution and the non-localized integral measurements using the Crank–Nicolson finite difference method. The inverse problem is solved by simultaneously finding the temperature distribution, the time-dependent free-boundary function indicating the location of the moving interface, and the time-wise thermal diffusivity or advection velocities. We reformulate the inverse problem as a non-