Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) bars are anisotropic in nature and have high tensile strength in the fiber direction. The use of High-Strength Concrete (HSC) allows for better use of the high-strength properties of FRP bars. The mechanical properties of FRP bars can yield to large crack widths and deflections. As a result, the design of concrete elements reinforced with FRP materials is often governed by the Serviceability Limit States (SLS). This study investigates the short-term serviceability behavior of FRP RC I-beams. Eight RC I-beams reinforced with carbon-FRP (CFRP) and four steel RC I-beams, for comparison purposes, were tested under two-point loading.
Deformations on the concrete and crack widths and spacing are measured and

     Pumpkin waste powder was used as a coloring and strengthening filler in epoxy to prepare a natural gelcoat . The Pumpkin powder was mixed with different weight ratios (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8%) to the epoxy matrix to select the best value of powder addition. The effect of the pumpkin particle size on the mechanical properties (impact, flexural, hardness, and wear loss) using two different sizes (2.5 and 1.25 microns) was studied. The impact strength increased from (10.09 KJ/ m²) for neat epoxy to (14.79 KJ/ m²) for epoxy with  1% of micron pumpkin fibers ( MPF) with particle size 2.5 micrometer and (14.21 KJ/ m²) for epoxy with 4% (1.25 MPF), flexural strength increased from (41.94 MPa) for n

Malaysia will be an ageing population by 2030 as the number of those aged 60 years and above has increased drastically from 6.2 percent in 2000 and is expected to reach 13.6 percent by 2030. There are many challenges that will be faced due to the ageing population, one of which is the increasing cost of pensions in the future. In view of that, it is necessary to investigate the effect of actuarial assumptions on pension liabilities under the perspective of ageing. To estimate the pension liabilities, the Projected Unit Credit method is used in the study and commutation functions are employed in the process. Demographic risk and salary risk have been identified as major risks in analyzing pension liabilities in this study. The sensitivity

Background: The antimicrobial resistance is one of the most serious and expanding health problems world -wide in the last decades. The esbl escherichia coli. (extended – spectrum beta-lactamase e.coli) represents an important aspect of it .Objectives: To get an overview on the esbl e.coli prevalence profile in general. Also to assess the antibiotic sensitivity of esbl e. coli trying to specify the most effective antibiotics in combating this micro-organism.Methods: this study tries to focus on this problem in Iraq which through a prospective study approach by taking 35 clinical samples from various sources (urine, blood, abscess, eye ,vagina ,stool and others),and after confirming the presence of e.coli, the presence of esbl e.coli and

ZnO organic hybrid junction (electroluminescence EL device) was fabricated using phase segregation method. ZnO-nanoparticle (NPs) was prepared as a colloidal by self–assembly method of Zinc acetate solution with KOH solution. Nanoparticle is employed to form organic-inorganic hybrid film and generate white light emission, while N,N’–diphenyl-N,N’ –bis(3-methylphenyl)-1,1’-biphenyl 4,4’-diamine (TPD) and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) are adopted as the organic matrices. ZnO NPs was used to fabricate TPD: PMMA: ZnO NPs hybrid junction device. The photoluminescence (PL) and electroluminescence (EL) spectra of the TPD: PMMA: ZnO NPs hybrid device provided a broad emission band covering entirely the visible spectrum (∼350-∼700

Most Internet of Vehicles (IoV) applications are delay-sensitive and require resources for data storage and tasks processing, which is very difficult to afford by vehicles. Such tasks are often offloaded to more powerful entities, like cloud and fog servers. Fog computing is decentralized infrastructure located between data source and cloud, supplies several benefits that make it a non-frivolous extension of the cloud. The high volume data which is generated by vehicles’ sensors and also the limited computation capabilities of vehicles have imposed several challenges on VANETs systems. Therefore, VANETs is integrated with fog computing to form a paradigm namely Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) which provide low-latency services to mo

     In this work, new di-acid monomers 4, 4’-di-carboxillic-2”-chloro-4”- nitro triphenylamine (Di-CO2H-1), 4, 4’- di-carboxylic -2”,4”,6”-trichloro-triphenylamine (Di-CO2H-2) were synthesized by reaction of p-cyanobenzofluride with two aromatic amines (2-chloro 4-nitro aniline and 2,4,6-trichloro aniline by aromatic nucleophilc substitution method to produce two di cyano intermediates compounds 4, 4’-Dicyano-2”-chloro-4”- nitro triphenylamine (Di-CN1) and 4, 4’-dicyano-2”,4”,6”-trichloro-triphenylamine (Di-CN2) which form final di-carboxylic monomers after alkaline hydrolysis. Finally, these monomers react with two different arom

<span lang="EN-GB">Transmitting the highest capacity throughput over the longest possible distance without any regeneration stage is an important goal of any long-haul optical network system. Accordingly, Polarization-Multiplexed Quadrature Phase-Shift-Keying (PM-QPSK) was introduced lately to achieve high bit-rate with relatively high spectral efficiency. Unfortunately, the required broad bandwidth of PM-QPSK increases the linear and nonlinear impairments in the physical layer of the optical fiber network. Increased attention has been spent to compensate for these impairments in the last years. In this paper, Single Mode Fiber (SMF), single channel, PM-QPSK transceiver was simulated, with a mix of optical and electrical (Digi

         The issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the proposed LAD-Atan estimator