In order to study the dynamic response of historical masonry structures, a scaled down brick masonry model constructed in civil engineering department at Baghdad University to simulate a part of a real case study, which is Alkifil historic minaret. Most of the previous researches about masonry structures try to understand the behavior of the masonry under seismic loading by experimental and numerical methods. In this paper, the masonry units (bricks) simulated in scale (S= 1/6) with the exact shape of the prototype bricks. Cementitious tile adhesive was selected to be the mortar for the modeling. The height of the model designed to be 1.5 m with a 0.5 m diameter. Detailed construction steps were presented in this paper. Experts built the model with high accuracy. A shaking table and other dynamic testing facilities were used at the University of Baghdad. The model was tested using the time-compressed El Centro 1940 NS earthquake at different amplitudes. The first ground motion of (PGA= 0.05g) which considered as weak ground motion was used to check the adequacy of the conventional behavior of the masonry model and the limit of the elastic behavior of the model during weak earthquakes. Moderate ground motion (PGA=0.15g) was performed to investigate the response of the model with minor to moderate damages. The severe ground motions were not appropriate to use in such circumstances because of the possibility to overturn the model. The experimental results showed very adequacy of the model to withstand the weak and moderate earth motion with no observed cracks.
In this study, the optimum conditions for chitin deacetylase (CDA) production by Aspergillus flavus F1 in solid-state fermentation were investigated via two optimization strategies: classical optimization based on the method of one factor at a time and statistical optimization using response surface methodology. The result of classical optimization showed that corn supplemented with 2% chitin moisturized with mineral salts solution at pH=7 and five days of incubation time were the optimum conditions for increasing CDA production with approximately yield of 219.5 U/g solid substrate. Furthermore, pH, moisture level and inoculum size were systemically evaluated to improve CDA production based on a central composite design using the Design
... Show MoreThe background subtraction is a leading technique adopted for detecting the moving objects in video surveillance systems. Various background subtraction models have been applied to tackle different challenges in many surveillance environments. In this paper, we propose a model of pixel-based color-histogram and Fuzzy C-means (FCM) to obtain the background model using cosine similarity (CS) to measure the closeness between the current pixel and the background model and eventually determine the background and foreground pixel according to a tuned threshold. The performance of this model is benchmarked on CDnet2014 dynamic scenes dataset using statistical metrics. The results show a better performance against the state-of the art
... Show MoreBootstrap is one of an important re-sampling technique which has given the attention of researches recently. The presence of outliers in the original data set may cause serious problem to the classical bootstrap when the percentage of outliers are higher than the original one. Many methods are proposed to overcome this problem such Dynamic Robust Bootstrap for LTS (DRBLTS) and Weighted Bootstrap with Probability (WBP). This paper try to show the accuracy of parameters estimation by comparison the results of both methods. The bias , MSE and RMSE are considered. The criterion of the accuracy is based on the RMSE value since the method that provide us RMSE value smaller than other is con
... Show MoreThis paper presents theoretical parametric study of the curvature ductility capacity for reinforced concrete column sections. The study considers the behavior of concrete and reinforcing steel under different strain rates. A computer program has been written to compute the curvature ductility taking into account the spalling in concrete cover. Strain rate sensitive constitutive models of steel and concrete were used for predicting the moment-curvature relationship of reinforced concrete columns at different rate of straining. The study parameters are the yield strength of main reinforcement, yield strength of transverse reinforcement, compressive strength of concrete, spacing of ties and the axial load. The results indicated that hi
... Show MoreSeeds of five cultivars of oats (Avena sativa) were introduced from Italy in 2009. Seeds were propagated on the farm of the Dept. of Field Crops Sci. / Coll. of Agric. / Univ. of Baghdad in the season 2009 – 2010. The cultivars Anatolia, Alguda, Hamel, Pimula and Genzania were planted under 3 irrigation intervals; 3, 4 and 5 weeks to give water depth of 480, 400 and 320 mm, respectively . The depth of water was 80 mm each irrigation. A factorial experiment with RCBD of 4 replicates was conducted in 2 consecutive seasons in 2010 – 2011 and 2011 – 2012. The cultivar Alguda gave highest grain yield (8.07 t/ ha) under 480 mm, and 7.02 t / ha average of 3 water depths. This cultivar was characterized by high growth rate (13.2 g/m2/ d) that
... Show MoreThe issues related to the development of permafrost and seasonally frozen soils without their preliminary loosening by various earthmoving machines with active working bodies, magnetostrictive vibrators, that soften dense and frozen soils using acoustic elastic waves, are considered. The analytical studies allowed us to establish the regularities of the process of destruction of frozen soil by active teeth of bucket working bodies, according to which, the formulas for calculating the critical tensile stress and shear resistance were obtained. The research results allow us to determine the main parameters of wave loading for both a single radiation source and a group of "n" in-phase radiation sources. The intensity of the acoustic
... Show MoreIn this paper, Bayes estimators for the shape and scale parameters of Gamma distribution under the Entropy loss function have been obtained, assuming Gamma and Exponential priors for the shape and scale parameters respectively. Moment, Maximum likelihood estimators and Lindley’s approximation have been used effectively in Bayesian estimation. Based on Monte Carlo simulation method, those estimators are compared depending on the mean squared errors (MSE’s). The results show that, the performance of the Bayes estimator under Entropy loss function is better than other estimates in all cases.