Portland cement concrete is the most commonly used construction material in the world for decades. However, the searches in concrete technology are remaining growing to meet particular properties related to its strength, durability, and sustainability issue. Thus, several types of concrete have been developed to enhance concrete performance. Most of the modern concrete types have to contain supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) as a partial replacement of cement. These materials are either by-products of waste such as fly ash, slag, rice husk ash, and silica fume or from a geological resource like natural pozzolans and metakaolin (MK). Ideally, the utilization of SCMs will enhance the concrete performance, minimize environmental pollution and mitigate the drawbacks of cement production attributed to the highly CO2 emission. In general, MK's ultra-fineness and high pozzolanic activity are exhibited a remarkable performance of concrete in terms of strength and durability. However, the filler effect, acceleration of cement hydration, and the pozzolanic reaction with calcium hydroxide (CH) are the main factors influencing the performance of metakaolin as a cementitious material. Therefore, numerous researches have been undertaken on inclusion MK in concrete and mortar and production of (free-cement concrete) geopolymer concrete. This paper reviews some of previous native researches on effect of using Iraqi metakaolin as a pozzolanic material in different types of concrete. The standpoint of this review will guide the researchers on the importance of utilization of local MK and highlight the missing researches toward completing a comprehensive understanding of incorporation Iraqi-metakaolin in concrete technology.
Reflection cracking in asphalt concrete (AC) overlays is a common form of pavement deterioration that occurs when underlying cracks and joints in the pavement structure propagate through an overlay due to thermal and traffic-induced movement, ultimately degrading the pavement’s lifespan and performance. This study aims to determine how alterations in overlay thickness and temperature conditions, the incorporation of chopped fibers, and the use of geotextiles influence the overlay’s capacity to postpone the occurrence of reflection cracking. To achieve the above objective, a total of 36 prism specimens were prepared and tested using an overlay testing machine (OTM). The variables considered in this study were the thickness of the
... Show MoreBinary relations or interactions among bio-entities, such as proteins, set up the essential part of any living biological system. Protein-protein interactions are usually structured in a graph data structure called "protein-protein interaction networks" (PPINs). Analysis of PPINs into complexes tries to lay out the significant knowledge needed to answer many unresolved questions, including how cells are organized and how proteins work. However, complex detection problems fall under the category of non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-Hard) problems due to their computational complexity. To accommodate such combinatorial explosions, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are proven effective alternatives to heuristics in solvin
... Show MoreProducts’ quality inspection is an important stage in every production route, in which the quality of the produced goods is estimated and compared with the desired specifications. With traditional inspection, the process rely on manual methods that generates various costs and large time consumption. On the contrary, today’s inspection systems that use modern techniques like computer vision, are more accurate and efficient. However, the amount of work needed to build a computer vision system based on classic techniques is relatively large, due to the issue of manually selecting and extracting features from digital images, which also produces labor costs for the system engineers. In this research, we pr
... Show MoreThe virtual decomposition control (VDC) is an efficient tool suitable to deal with the full-dynamics-based control problem of complex robots. However, the regressor-based adaptive control used by VDC to control every subsystem and to estimate the unknown parameters demands specific knowledge about the system physics. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on reorganizing the equation of the VDC for a serial chain manipulator using the adaptive function approximation technique (FAT) without needing specific system physics. The dynamic matrices of the dynamic equation of every subsystem (e.g. link and joint) are approximated by orthogonal functions due to the minimum approximation errors produced. The contr
Products’ quality inspection is an important stage in every production route, in which the quality of the produced goods is estimated and compared with the desired specifications. With traditional inspection, the process rely on manual methods that generates various costs and large time consumption. On the contrary, today’s inspection systems that use modern techniques like computer vision, are more accurate and efficient. However, the amount of work needed to build a computer vision system based on classic techniques is relatively large, due to the issue of manually selecting and extracting features from digital images, which also produces labor costs for the system engineers.
 
... Show MoreThis paper presents a new algorithm in an important research field which is the semantic word similarity estimation. A new feature-based algorithm is proposed for measuring the word semantic similarity for the Arabic language. It is a highly systematic language where its words exhibit elegant and rigorous logic. The score of sematic similarity between two Arabic words is calculated as a function of their common and total taxonomical features. An Arabic knowledge source is employed for extracting the taxonomical features as a set of all concepts that subsumed the concepts containing the compared words. The previously developed Arabic word benchmark datasets are used for optimizing and evaluating the proposed algorithm. In this paper,
... Show MoreThis study focuses on the use of an optimum amount of Sodium Polyacrylate (SP) for designing cement slurry with the high performance of rheological properties and displacement efficiency. A laboratory study has been carried out on the cement slurry which prepared with SP as superabsorbent polymer. SP has been providing an internal water source that helps in the hydration process, and curing and ultimately increases the cement strength. Also improves the cement performance by improving the cement stability. Several batches were prepared to determine the proper amount of SP to add it in the cement slurry. Also, we studied its effect on cement density, amount of free water in order to observe the rheological properties, and thickening time.
... Show MoreThe digital communication of a product of communication and information revolution. It is characterized by accurate and comprehensive in its services and its effects, which brought changes in the structure of many communities and their organizational structures. They have significant impacts on the social systems and social relations, especially in the Arab societies, which are the focus of the globalized Western media, for many reasons: economical, political , cultural and social.
According to this perception, the Arab identity has become in an encounter with big challenges by the globalized media of trade and the media, which aims to achieve greater profits because of identity and its importance to the communities. This occurs par