This paper examines the impact of flexural strengthening on the percentage of damaged strands in internally unbonded tendons in partially prestressed concrete beams (0, 14.28%, and 28.57%) and the recovering conditions using CFRP composite longitudinal laminates at the soffit, and end anchorage U-wrap sheets to restore the original flexural capacity and mitigate the delamination of the soffit of longitudinal Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) laminates. The composition of the laminates and anchors affected the stress of the CFRP, the failure mode, and thus the behavior of the beam. The experimental results revealed that the usage of CFRP laminates has a considerable impact on strand strain, particularly when anchors are employed

Abstract

One of the most suitable materials to be used in latent heat thermal energy storage system (LHTES) are Phase change materials, but a problem of slow melting and solidification processes made many researchers focusing on how to improve their thermal properties. This experimental work concerned with the enhancing of thermal conductivity of phase change material. The enhancing method was by the addition of copper Lessing rings in phase change material (paraffin wax). The effect of diameter for the used rings was studied by using two different diameters (0.5 cm and 1cm). Also, three volumetric percentages of rings addition (3%, 6% and 10%) were tested for each diameter. The discharging process was done with

This paper proposed a new method for network self-fault management (NSFM) based on two technologies: intelligent agent to automate fault management tasks, and Windows Management Instrumentations (WMI) to identify the fault faster when resources are independent (different type of devices). The proposed network self-fault management reduced the load of network traffic by reducing the request and response between the server and client, which achieves less downtime for each node in state of fault occurring in the client. The performance of the proposed system is measured by three measures: efficiency, availability, and reliability. A high efficiency average is obtained depending on the faults occurred in the system which reaches to

Correct grading of apple slices can help ensure quality and improve the marketability of the final product, which can impact the overall development of the apple slice industry post-harvest. The study intends to employ the convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures of ResNet-18 and DenseNet-201 and classical machine learning (ML) classifiers such as Wide Neural Networks (WNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), and two kernels of support vector machines (SVM) to classify apple slices into different hardness classes based on their RGB values. Our research data showed that the DenseNet-201 features classified by the SVM-Cubic kernel had the highest accuracy and lowest standard deviation (SD) among all the methods we tested, at 89.51 %  1.66 %. This

Optimizing the Access Point (AP) deployment has a great role in wireless applications due to the need for providing an efficient communication with low deployment costs. Quality of Service (QoS), is a major significant parameter and objective to be considered along with AP placement as well the overall deployment cost. This study proposes and investigates a multi-level optimization algorithm called Wireless Optimization Algorithm for Indoor Placement (WOAIP) based on Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO). WOAIP aims to obtain the optimum AP multi-floor placement with effective coverage that makes it more capable of supporting QoS and cost-effectiveness. Five pairs (coverage, AP deployment) of weights, signal thresholds and received s