The design of components subjected to contact stress as local compressive stress is important in engineering application especially in ball and socket Joining.  Two kinds of contact stress are introduced in the ball and socket joint, the first is from normal contact while the other is from sliding contact. Although joining two long links (drive shaft in steering cars) will cause the effect of flexural and tensional buckling stress in hollow columns through the ball and socket ends on the failure condition of the joining mechanism. In this paper the consideration of the combined effect of buckling Load and contact stress on the ball and socket joints have been taken, epically on the stress distribution in the contact area. Different

Inherent fluctuations in the availability of energy from renewables, particularly solar, remain a substantial impediment to their widespread deployment worldwide. Employing phase-change materials (PCMs) as media, saving energy for later consumption, offers a promising solution for overcoming the problem. However, the heat conductivities of most PCMs are limited, which severely limits the energy storage potential of these materials. This study suggests employing circular fins with staggered distribution to achieve improved thermal response rates of PCM in a vertical triple-tube heat exchanger involving two opposite flow streams of the heat-transfer fluid (HTF). Since heat diffusion is not the same at various portions of the PCM unit,

The neutrophil/ lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet/lymphocyte ratio (PLR) have the potential to be inflammatory markers that reflect the activity of many inflammatory diseases. The aim of this study was to evaluate the NLR and PLR as potential markers of disease activity in patients with ankylosing spondylitis.

This study expands the state of the art in studies that assess torsional retrofit of reinforced concrete (RC) multi-cell box girders with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips. The torsional behavior of non-damaged and pre-damaged RC multi-cell box girder specimens externally retrofitted by CFRP strips was investigated through a series of laboratory experiments. It was found that retrofitting the pre-damaged specimens with CFRP strips increased the ultimate torsional capacity by more than 50% as compared to the un-damaged specimens subjected to equivalent retrofitting. This indicated that the retrofit has been less effective for the girder specimen that did not develop distortion beforehand as a result of pre-loading. From

This study expands the state of the art in studies that assess torsional retrofit of reinforced concrete (RC) multi-cell box girders with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips. The torsional behavior of non-damaged and pre-damaged RC multi-cell box girder specimens externally retrofitted by CFRP strips was investigated through a series of laboratory experiments. It was found that retrofitting the pre-damaged specimens with CFRP strips increased the ultimate torsional capacity by more than 50% as compared to the un-damaged specimens subjected to equivalent retrofitting. This indicated that the retrofit has been less effective for the girder specimen that did not develop distortion beforehand as a result of pre-loading. From

The current study was designed to evaluate the anti-inflammatory effect of GKB in the rat model of granulomatous inflammation. Thirty rats were distributed into five groups:  The first group served as negative control group that received distilled water (DW) only without inducting inflammation, positive control group; treated with DW with the induction of inflammation and they were assigned to cotton pellet-induced granuloma, ginkgo biloba (GKB) treated group (200mg/kg/day), dexamethasone-treated group (1mg/kg), and Prednisolone treated group (5mg/kg). All the treatments were given orally for seven consecutive days.  On day eight, the rats were anesthetized and the pellets together with granulation tissue were carefully removed

A reliable and environmental analytical method was developed for the direct determination of tetracycline using flow injection analysis (FIA) and batch procedures with spectrophotometric detection. The developed method is based on the reaction between a chromogenic reagent (vanadium (III) solution) and tetracycline at room temperature and in a neutral medium, resulting in the formation of an intense brown product that shows maximum absorption at 395 nm. The analytical conditions were improved by the application of experimental design. The proposed method was successfully used to analyze samples of commercial medications and verified throughout the concentration ranges of 25–250 and 3–25 µg/mL for both FIA and batch procedures, respecti

In Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) the non-linear data projection provided by a one hidden layer Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), trained to recognize phonemes, and has previous experiments to provide feature enhancement substantially increased ASR performance, especially in noise. Previous attempts to apply an analogous approach to speaker identification have not succeeded in improving performance, except by combining MLP processed features with other features. We present test results for the TIMIT database which show that the advantage of MLP preprocessing for open set speaker identification increases with the number of speakers used to train the MLP and that improved identification is obtained as this number increases beyond sixty.

Background: Neudesin is a peptide secreted in brain and adipose tissues that has neural and metabolic functions. Its role as regulator of energy expenditure leads to assumption that its level may be regulated depending on thyroid gland pathology. Objective: This study aimed to investigate serum neudesin levels in patients with thyroidism and to evaluate1 any possible relationship between plasma neudesin levels and thyroid hormone levels. Methods: The study included 100 women with newly diagnosed thyroidisim were subdivided into two groups: hyperthyroidism group (50 female patients with age ranged from 18 to 60 years) and hypothyroidism group (50 female patients with age ranged from 18 to 75 years). A control group (30 healthy females with a