Improving the accuracy of load-deformation behavior, failure mode, and ultimate load capacity for reinforced concrete members subjected to in-plane loadings such as corbels, wall to foundation connections and panels need shear strength behavior to be included. Shear design in reinforced concrete structures depends on crack width, crack slippage and roughness of the surface of cracks.

This paper illustrates results of an experimental investigation conducted to investigate the direct shear strength of fiber normal strength concrete (NSC) and reactive powder concrete (RPC). The tests were performed along a pre-selected shear plane in concrete members named push-off specimens. The effectiveness of concrete compressiv

Morphologies of ceramic hollow fiber membranes prepared by a combined phase-inversion and sintering method were studied. The organic binder spinning solution containing suspended Al₂O₃ powders was spun to a hollow fiber precursor, which was then sintered at elevated temperatures( 300 ˚C, 1400 ˚C, 25 ˚C) in order to obtain the Al₂O₃ hollow fiber membranes. The spinning solution consisted of polyether sulfone (PES), N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), which were used as polymer binder, solvent, respectively. The prepared Al₂O₃ hollow fiber membranes were characterized by a scanning electron microscope (SEM). It is believed that finger-like void formation in asymmetric ceramic membranes is initiated by hydrodynamically unstable vis

A reduced-order extended state observer (RESO) based a continuous sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed in this paper for the tracking problem of high order Brunovsky systems with the existence of external perturbations and system uncertainties. For this purpose, a composite control is constituted by two consecutive steps. First, the reduced-order ESO (RESO) technique is designed to estimate unknown system states and total disturbance without estimating an available state. Second, the continuous SMC law is designed based on the estimations supplied by the RESO estimator in order to govern the nominal system part. More importantly, the robustness performance is well achieved by compensating not only the lumped disturbance, but also its esti

In this paper, the characteristics of microstrip monopole antennas are studied firstly in free space. Secondly, the effects of the human body on the studied antenna's performance are investigated for wearable communications. Different patch shapes of microstrip monopole antenna are chosen to operate at two bands: industrial scientific and medical band (ISM) and ultra-wideband (UWB) for wearable applications. The studied antenna consists of a radiating element on one side of the substrate and a partial ground plane on the other side. The antenna is supposed to fabricate on cloth fabric whose relative dielectric constant is Ɛr =1.7. At the same time, the pure copper could be used as the conducting part representing both t

This study aims to identify the level of application of blue ocean leadership activities in public organizations and to build a conceptual and cognitive framework around this concept. The study adopted a descriptive-analytical approach, and the research sample consisted of (95) individuals from the senior management working at the center of the Iraqi Ministry of Communications (director general, department manager, section head). The data analysis technique used is structural equation modeling (SEM) and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The results indicate that the senior management in the Ministry of Communications is working to adopt the blue ocean leadership style through its activities, but not to the leve

The control of an aerial flexible joint robot (FJR) manipulator system with underactuation is a difficult task due to unavoidable factors, including, coupling, underactuation, nonlinearities, unmodeled uncertainties, and unpredictable external disturbances. To mitigate those issues, a new robust fixed-time sliding mode control (FxTSMC) is proposed by using a fixed-time sliding mode observer (FxTSMO) for the trajectory tracking problem of the FJR attached to the drones system. First, the underactuated FJR is comprehensively modeled and converted to a canonical model by employing two state transformations for ease of the control design. Then, based on the availability of the measured states, a cascaded FxTSMO (CFxTSMO) is constructed to estim

Abstract: The increased interest in developing new photonic devices that can support high data rates, high sensitivity and fast processing capabilities for all optical communications, motivates a pre stage pulse compressor research. The pre-stage research was based on cascading single mode fiber and polarization maintaining fiber to get pulse compression with compression factor of 1.105. The demand for obtaining more précised photonic devices; this work experimentally studied the behavior of Polarization maintaining fiber PMF that is sandwiched between two cascaded singe mode fiber SMF and fiber Bragg gratings FBG. Therefore; the introduced interferometer performed hybrid interference of both Mach-Zehnder

In this research we prepared nanofibers by electrospinning from
poly (Vinyl Alcohol) /TiO2. The spectrum of the solution (Emission)
was studied and found to be at 772 nm, several process parameters
were such as concentration of TiO2 , and the effect of distance from
nozzle tip to the grounded collector (gap distance). The result of the
lower concentration of, the smaller the diameter of nanofiber is.
Increasing the gap distance will affect nanofibers diameter

To demonstrate the effect of changing cavity length for FM mode locked on pulse parameters and make comparison for both dispersion regime , a plot for each pulse parameter as Lr function are presented for normal and anomalous dispersion regimes . The analysis is based on the theoretical study and the results of numerical simulation using MATLAB. The effect of both normal and anomalous dispersion regimes on output pulses is investigate Fiber length effects on pulse parameters are investigated by driving the modulator into different values. A numerical solution for model equations using fourth-fifth order, Runge-Kutta method is performed through MATLAB 7.0 program. Fiber length effect on pulse parameters is investigated by driving th