Concrete structures are exposed to aggressive environmental conditions that lead to corrosion of the embedded reinforcement and pre-stressing steel. Consequently, the safety of concrete structures may be compromised, and this requires a significant budgets to repair and maintain critical infrastructure. Prediction of structural safety can lead to significant reductions in maintenance costs by maximizing the impact of investments. The aim of this paper is to establish a framework to assess the reliability of existing post-tensioned concrete bridges. A time-dependent reliability analysis of an existing post-tensioned involving the assessment of Ynys-y-Gwas bridge has been presented in this study. The main cause of failure of this bridge was c

The designer must find the optimum match between the object's technical and economic needs and the performance and production requirements of the various material options when choosing material for an engineering application. This study proposes an integrated (hybrid) strategy for selecting the optimal material for an engineering design depending on design requirements. The primary objective is to determine the best candidate material for the drone wings based on Ashby's performance indices and then rank the result using a grey relational technique with the entropy weight method. Aluminum alloys, titanium alloys, composites, and wood have been suggested as suitable materials for manufacturing drone wings. The requirement

In this paper we study the selection of cognitive elements and criteria of the inflectional structure of the Russian and Arabic languages in the process of speech communication. Phonetic-physiological principle is the main parameter by which the elements and criteria of cognitive activity in the presented study are distinguished. On the basis of the above mentioned parameter, we select the investigated criteria and elements. The first criterion is semantic, reflects the accordance of the elements of thinking to sound combinations in the studied languages, and allows us to distinguish the second criterion – morphonological. The second criterion depends on the phonetic changes of these combinations occurring in the process of speech activit

Carbonate-clastic succession which includes the Shu'aiba, Nahr Umr and Mauddud formations are representing a part of the Barremian-Aptian Sequence (Wasi'a Group). The present study includes three boreholes (Ba-1, 4 and 8) within the Balad Oil Field. The study area is located in central Iraq. This field represents a subsurface anticline with a northwest to southeast direction axis within the Mesopotamian Zone. Eight types of microfacies were recognized in the succession of the Mauddud and Shu’aiba formations. These microfacies represent shallow open marine, restricted and semi-restricted, reef - back reef, deep open marine and basinal depositional environments. While Nahr Umr Formation includes two successions, the first is the upp

Free Space Optics (FSO) plays a vital role in modern wireless communications due to its advantages over fiber optics and RF techniques where a transmission of huge bandwidth and access to remote places become possible. The specific aim of this research is to analyze the Bit-Error Rate (BER) for FSO communication system when the signal is sent the over medium of turbulence channel, where the fading channel is described by the Gamma-Gamma model. The signal quality is improved by using Optical Space-Time Block- Code (OSTBC) and then the BER will be reduced. Optical 2×2 Alamouti scheme required 14 dB bit energy to noise ratio (Eb/N0) at 10-5 bit error rate (BER) which gives 3.5 dB gain as compared to no diversity scheme. Th

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Polymethylmethacrylate film (PMMA) of thickness 75 μm was evaluated Spectrophotometrically for using it as a low-doses gamma radiation dosimeter. The doses were examined in the range 0.1 mrad-10 krad. Within an absorption band of 200-400 nm, the irradiated films showed an increase in the absorption intensity with increasing the absorbed doses. Calibration curves for the changes in the absorption differences were obtained at 218, 301, and 343 nm. At 218 nm the response for the absorbed doses is a linear in the range 10 mrad- 10 krad. Hence it is recommended to be adopted as an environmental low doses dosimeter