Flexure members such as reinforced concrete (RC) simply supported beams subjected to two-point loading were analyzed numerically. The Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) was employed for the treatment the non-smooth h behaviour such as discontinuities and singularities. This method is a powerful technique used for the analysis of the fracture process and crack propagation in concrete. Concrete is a heterogeneous material that consists of coarse aggregate, cement mortar and air voids distributed in the cement paste. Numerical modeling of concrete comprises a two-scale model, using mesoscale and macroscale numerical models. The effectiveness and validity of the Meso-Scale Approach (MSA) in modeling of the reinforced concrete beams w

Furfural is a toxic aromatic aldehyde that can cause a severe environmental problem especially the wastewater drown from petroleum refinery units. In the present work, a useless by-product from local furniture manufacturing industry; sawdust was used as raw material for the preparation of activated carbon which is chemically activated with phosphoric acid. The effect of adsorption variables which include initial pH of solution (2-9), agitation speed (50-250) rpm, agitation time (15-120) min, initial concentration of furfural (50-250) ppm, and amount of adsorbent material (0.5-2.5) g for the three adsorbents used (prepared activated carbon, commercial activated carbon and raw sawdust) were investigated in a batch process

The utilization and incorporation of glass fiber-reinforced plastics (GFRP) in structural applications and architectural constructions are progressively gaining prominence. Therefore, this paper experimentally and numerically investigates the use of GFRP I-beams in conjunction with concrete slabs to form composite beams. The experimental design incorporated 2600 mm long GFRP I-beams which were connected compositely to concrete slabs with a 500 mm width and 80 mm thickness. The concrete slabs are categorized into two groups: concrete slabs cast using normal-strength concrete (NSC), and concrete slabs prepared using high-strength concrete (HSC). Various parameters like the type of concrete (normal and high-strength concrete), type of

Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs) has developed as an innovative technology for access places without permanent infrastructure. This emerging form of networking is construct of flying nodes known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that fly at a fast rate of speed, causing frequent changes in the network topology and connection failures. As a result, there is no dedicated FANET routing protocol that enables effective communication between these devices. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the category of topology-based routing protocols in the FANET. In a surveillance system involving video traffic, four routing protocols with varying routing mechanisms were examined. Additionally, simulation experiments conduct

Data-driven models perform poorly on part-of-speech tagging problems with the square Hmong language, a low-resource corpus. This paper designs a weight evaluation function to reduce the influence of unknown words. It proposes an improved harmony search algorithm utilizing the roulette and local evaluation strategies for handling the square Hmong part-of-speech tagging problem. The experiment shows that the average accuracy of the proposed model is 6%, 8% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively. Meanwhile, the average F1 of the proposed model is also 6%, 3% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively.

This study presents experimental and numerical investigations on seven one-way, reinforced concrete (RC) slabs with a new technique of slab weight reduction using polystyrene-embedded arched blocks (PEABs). All slabs had the same dimensions, steel reinforcement, and concrete compressive strength. One of these slabs was a solid slab, which was taken as a control slab, while the other six slabs were cast with PEABs. The main variables were the ratio of the length of the PEABs to the length of the slab (lp/L) and the ratio of the height of the PEABs to the total slab depth (hP/H). The minimum decrease in the ultimate load capacity was about 6% with a minimum reduction in the slab weight of 15%. In contrast, the maximum decrease in the

The problem of water scarcity is becoming common in many parts of the world, to overcome part of this problem proper management of water and an efficient irrigation system are needed.  Irrigation with a buried vertical ceramic pipe is known as a very effective in the management of irrigation water.  The two- dimensional transient flow of water from a buried vertical ceramic pipe through homogenous porous media is simulated numerically using the HYDRUS/2D software.  Different values of pipe lengths and hydraulic conductivity were selected.  In addition, different values of initial volumetric soil water content were assumed in this simulation as initial conditions.  Different value

 Inflammatory bowel disease includes both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, progressive relapsing disease of gastrointestinal tract that require long-term treatment or maintenance therapy. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an important factor that affects compliance of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is a prerequisite for better compliance. The aim of the current study was to investigate and assess beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine possible association between these beliefs and some patient-specific factors.

This study is a cross-sectional study carried out o

Due to the deliberate disposal of industrial waste, a great amount of petroleum hydrocarbons pollute the soil and aquatic environments. Bioremediation that depends on the microorganisms in the removal of pollutants is more efficient and cost-effective technology. In this study, five rhizobacteria were isolated from Phragmites australis roots and exposed to real wastewater from Al-Daura refinery with 70 mg/L total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) concentration. The five selected rhizobacteria were examined in a biodegradation test for seven days to remove TPH. The results showed that 80% TPH degradation as the maximum value by Sphingomonas Paucimobilis as identified with Vitek® 2 Compact (France).