In this study, six square reinforced concrete flat plates with dimensions of (1500×1500×100) mm were tested under a concentrated load applied on a column located at the center of the slabs. One of these slabs was the control specimen, whereas, in the others, steel angles (steel collars) were used, fixed at the connection region between the slab and the column to investigate the effect of the presence of these collars on punching shear strength. Five thicknesses were used (4, 5, 6, 8, 10mm) with constant legs of angles (75×75) mm of the steel collars to investigate the effects on the punching shear resistance with respect to the control slab. The results of the experimental study show that the punching shear resistance increased b

To develop a petrol engine so that it works under the bi-engine pattern (producer gas-petrol) without any additional engine modifications, a single-point injection method inside the intake manifold is a simple and inexpensive method. Still, it leads to poor mixing performance between the air and producer gas. This deficiency can cause unsatisfactory engine performance and high exhaust emissions. In order to improve the mixing inside the intake manifold, nine separate cases were modelled to evaluate the impact of the position and angle orientation inside the intake manifold on the uniformity and spread of the mixture under AFR=2.07. A petrol engine (1.6 L), the maximum engine speed (8000 rpm), and bi-engine mode (petrol-producer ga

Deception is an inseparable facet of political discourse in attaining strategic political gains though compromising public opinion. However, the employment of discursive deception strategies by the policy-making institutions of think tanks has not received due attention in the literature. The current study aims at exploring how the ideologizing deception strategies are utilized by the conservative American think tank of the Washington Institute to reproduce socio-political realities and re-shape public opinion. To fulfill this task, van Dijk’s (2000) notion of ideological polarization which shows positive self-representation and negative other representation is adopted to conduct a critical discourse analysis of four Arabic texts relea

When the depth of stressed soil is rather small, Plate Load Test (PLT) becomes the most efficient test to estimate the soil properties for design purposes. Among these properties, modulus of subgrade reaction is the most important one that usually employed in roads and concrete pavement design. Two methods are available to perform PLT: static and dynamic methods. Static PLT is usually adopted due to its simplicity and time saving to be performs in comparison with cyclic (dynamic) method. The two methods are described in ASTM standard.

In this paper the effect of the test method used in PLT in estimation of some mechanical soil properties was distinguished via a series of both test methods applied in a same site. The comparison of

The load shedding  scheme has been extensively implemented as a fast solution for unbalance conditions. Therefore, it's crucial to investigate supply-demand balancing in order to protect the network from collapsing and to sustain stability as possible, however its implementation is mostly undesirable. One of the solutions to minimize the amount of load shedding is the integration renewable energy  resources, such as wind power, in the electric power generation could contribute significantly to minimizing power cuts as it is ability to positively improving the stability of the electric grid. In this paper propose a method for shedding the load base on the priority demands with incorporating the wind po

BACKGROUND: Many genetic factors are known to be related to osteoporosis, and currently the role of the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) gene in bone health has been studied intensively. Some variation of this gene, such as rs1042044 and rs6458093, are known to be linked to metabolic diseases and lower bone mineral density, however their specific contribution to osteoporosis remains largely unexplored. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the combined genotypic effect of rs1042044 and rs6458093 as a genetic risk factor for osteoporosis in postmenopausal Iraqi women.METHODS: Blood samples from 75 osteoporosis patients and 75 healthy controls, aged 45-85, were collected. DNA was extracted, and a region of GLP-1R

The two-dimensional transient heat conduction through a thermal insulation of temperature dependent thermal properties is investigated numerically using the FVM. It is assumed that this insulating material is initially at a uniform temperature. Then, it is suddenly subjected at its inner surface with a step change in temperature and subjected at its outer surface with a natural convection boundary condition associated with a periodic change in ambient temperature and heat flux of solar radiation. Two thermal insulation materials were selected. The fully implicit time scheme is selected to represent the time discretization. The arithmetic mean thermal conductivity is chosen to be the value of the approximated thermal conductivity at the i

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques enable transparency and trust in automated visual inspection systems by making black-box machine learning models understandable. While XAI has been widely applied, prior reviews have not addressed the specific demands of industrial and medical inspection tasks. This paper reviews studies applying XAI techniques to visual inspection across industrial and medical domains. A systematic search was conducted in IEEE Xplore, Scopus, PubMed, arXiv, and Web of Science for studies published between 2014 and 2025, with inclusion criteria requiring the application of XAI in inspection tasks using public or domain-specific datasets. From an initial pool of studies, 75 were included and categorized in