Concrete pavements are essential to modern infrastructure, but their low tensile and flexural strengths can cause cracking and shrinkage. This study evaluates fiber reinforcement with steel and carbon fibers in various combinations to improve rigid pavement performance. Six concrete mixes were tested: a control mix with no fiber, a mix with 1% steel fiber (SF1%), a mix with 1% carbon fiber (CF1%), and three hybrid mixes with 1% fiber content: 0.75% steel /0.25% carbon fiber (SF0.75CF0.25), 0.25% steel /0.75% carbon fiber (SF0.25CF0.75), and 0.5% steel /0.5% carbon fiber ((SF0.5CF0.5). Laboratory experiments including compressive, flexural, and splitting tensile strength tests were conducted at 7, 28, and 90 days, while Finite Element Analys

Many previous investigations have found quercetin to be a powerful antioxidant and antitumor flavonoid, but its poor bioavailability has limited its use. This current study investigated the effects of two newly synthesized Quercetin Schiff bases containing 2-amino thiadiazole-5-thiol (Q1), and its benzyl derivatives (Q2) on MCF-7 human breast cancer cells. Cell viability and apoptosis were assessed to determine the toxic effects of Q1 and Q2. Cytotoxicity valuation showed that both compounds inhibited MCF-7 cell growth, and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) activity increased in a dose-dependent aspect compared to the control group. Comet assay results observed that Q1 and Q2 induce more serious DNA damage than the control (untreated cell

The influence of the grounded electrode area on the ignition voltage in capcitively coupled radio frequency discharge at 13.56 MHz in argon gas is studied experimentally. The results indicate a systematic decrease of the breakdown voltage with increasing grounded electrode area for the same pd value. Results show that the secondary ionization coefficient γ increases with the increase of grounded electrode area. Furthermore, results also the discharge current at the breakdown voltage increases almost linearly with the increase of electrode area suggesting an almost constant current density.

Background: Moral distress, as one of the most important issues in the nursing profession, can negatively affect the healthcare system Objectives: To examine the effect of moral distress on decision making. Methodology: A descriptive cross-sectional study a non-probability sampling method was used and a total sample collected was (126) ICU nurses Result: Moral distress among ICUs nurses were moderate and decision making was good Conclusion: Although nurses in ICUs perceive good decision making but suffered from moderate MD which affected their decision making. MD is still an important issue that nurses may face in ICUs Conclusion: Although nurses in ICUs perceive good decision making but suffered from moderate MD which affected the

The choice of gate dielectric materials is fundamental for organic field effect transistors (OFET), integrated circuits, and several electronic applications. The operation of the OFET depends on two essential parameters: the insulation between the semiconductor layer and the gate electrode and the capacitance of the insulator. In this work, the electrical behavior of a pentacene-based OFET with a top contact / bottom gate was studied. Organic polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and inorganic hafnium oxide (HfO₂) were chosen as gate dielectric materials to lower the operation voltage to achieve the next generation of electronic applications. In this study, the performance of the OFET was studied using monolayer and bilayer gate insulators.

To observe the effect of media of the internal pressure on the equivalent stress distribution in the tube, an experimental study is done by constructing a testing rig to apply the hydraulic pressure and three dies are manufactured with different bulging configurations (square, cosine, and conical). In the other part, ANSYS APDL is generated to analyze the bulging process with hydraulic and rubber (natural and industrial) media. It was found that when the media is a rubber, the stress is decreased about 9.068% in case of cosine die and 5.4439% in case of conical die and 2.8544% in case of square die. So, it can be concluded that the internal pressure in the rubber media is much better than in hydraulic media. Also, the force needed for fo

Saudi Arabia’s banking sector plays an important role in the country’s development as it is among the leading sectors in the financial sector. Considering, two main Saudi banks (The National Commercial Bank and Saudi American bank), the present study aims to observe the impact of emotional intelligence on employee performance. The components of emotional intelligence affecting employee performance include self-management, relationship management, self-awareness, and social awareness. A quantitative methodology was applied to analyse the survey results of 300 respondents over the period from 2018 to 2019. The results show that there was a significant positive impact of self-management, self-awareness, and relationship manageme

Sewage pumping stations are considered an important part of any sewerage system. Pumps failure in these stations means that the pumps are unable to work at the design requirement (flow capacity and head) and that may cause sewer overflow and flooding leading to sewer deterioration. In this paper, two main sewage pumping stations in Baghdad city were selected as case studies, Al- Habibia and Al-Ghazali located on Zublin trunk sewer 3000 mm and Baghdad trunk sewer 1200-2100 respectively. This study focused mainly on the operation of main sewage pumping stations and their effect, both directly and indirectly, on changing hydraulic properties, which leads to an increase in the deterioration of sewage pipes. The hydraulic analysis was co

This paper proposes improving the structure of the neural controller based on the identification model for nonlinear systems. The goal of this work is to employ the structure of the Modified Elman Neural Network (MENN) model into the NARMA-L2 structure instead of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model in order to construct a new hybrid neural structure that can be used as an identifier model and a nonlinear controller for the SISO linear or nonlinear systems. Two learning algorithms are used to adjust the parameters weight of the hybrid neural structure with its serial-parallel configuration; the first one is supervised learning algorithm based Back Propagation Algorithm (BPA) and the second one is an intelligent algorithm n

A new modified differential evolution algorithm DE-BEA, is proposed to improve the reliability of the standard DE/current-to-rand/1/bin by implementing a new mutation scheme inspired by the bacterial evolutionary algorithm (BEA). The crossover and the selection schemes of the DE method are also modified to fit the new DE-BEA mechanism. The new scheme diversifies the population by applying to all the individuals a segment based scheme that generates multiple copies (clones) from each individual one-by-one and applies the BEA segment-wise mechanism. These new steps are embedded in the DE/current-to-rand/bin scheme. The performance of the new algorithm has been compared with several DE variants over eighteen benchmark functions including sever