The objective of this work is to study the influence of α-amylase enzymatic solution immersion, soil burial and water immersion on the biodegradability behavior of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) /Corn Starch (CS) blend films Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) /Corn Starch (CS) blend films were prepared by solution casting method with different weight percentages of PVA(0%,10%,30%,50%,70% and 90%) . The biodegradability of the films has been investigated by determination the weight loss of the tested films. It was noticed that the films containing corn starch were highly biodegraded under above influences. The weight loss of the tested films decreased with increasing PVA content and increased with immersion time in enzymatic solution and water and soil bu

This study focuses on the modeling of manufactured damper when used in steel buildings. The main aim of the manufactured dampers is to protect the steel buildings from the damaging effects that may result due to earthquakes by introducing an extra damping in addition to the traditional damping.
Only Pure Manufactured Dampers, has been considered in this study. Viscous modeling of damping is generally preferred in structural engineering as it leads to a linear model then it has been used during this study to simulate the behavior of the Pure Manufactured Damper.
After definition of structural parameters of a manufactured damper (its stiffness and its damping) it can be used as a structural element that can be added to a mathematica

Existence of these soils, sometimes with high gypsum content, caused difficult problems to the buildings and strategic projects due to dissolution and leaching of gypsum by the action of waterflow through soil mass. In this research, a new technique is adopted to investigate the performance of replacement and geosynthetic reinforcement materials to improve the gypseous soil behavior through experimential set up manufactured loaclally specially for this work. A series of tests were carried out using steel container (600*600*500) mm. A square footing (100*100) mm was placed at the center of the top surface of the bed soil. The results showed that the most effective thickness for the dune sand layer with geotextile at the interface, within

In this paper, a new equivalent lumped parameter model is proposed for describing the vibration of beams under the moving load effect. Also, an analytical formula for calculating such vibration for low-speed loads is presented. Furthermore, a MATLAB/Simulink model is introduced to give a simple and accurate solution that can be used to design beams subjected to any moving loads, i.e., loads of any magnitude and speed. In general, the proposed Simulink model can be used much easier than the alternative FEM software, which is usually used in designing such beams. The obtained results from the analytical formula and the proposed Simulink model were compared with those obtained from Ansys R19.0, and very good agreement has been shown. I

    The issues related to the development of permafrost and seasonally frozen soils without their preliminary loosening by various earthmoving machines with active working bodies, magnetostrictive vibrators, that soften dense and frozen soils using acoustic elastic waves, are considered. The analytical studies allowed us to establish the regularities of the process of destruction of frozen soil by active teeth of bucket working bodies, according to which, the formulas for calculating the critical tensile stress and shear resistance were obtained. The research results allow us to determine the main parameters of wave loading for both a single radiation source and a group of "n" in-phase radiation sources. The intensity of the acoustic

In the geotechnical engineering applications, precise understandings are yet to be established on the effects of a foundation stiffness on its bearing capacity and settlement. The modern foundation construction uses the new available construction materials that totally change the relative stiffness of the footing structures-soil interactions such as waste material and landfill area of more residential purposes. Conventional bearing capacity equations were dealt with common rigid footing and thus cannot be used for reduced foundation rigidity. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of foundation relative stiffness on its load-displacement behaviour and the soil deformation field using compression test of a strip smooth footings on su

Buckling analysis of composite laminates for critical thermal (uniform and linear) and mechanical loads is reported here. The objective of this work is to carry out theoretical investigation of buckling analysis of composite plates under thermomechanical loads, and experimental investigation under mechanical loads. The analytical investigation involved certain mathematical preliminaries, a study of equations of orthotropic elasticity for classical laminated plate theory (CLPT), higher order shear deformation plate theory (HSDT) , and numerical analysis (Finite element method), then the equation of motion are derived and solved using Navier method and Levy method for symmetric and anti-symmetric cross-ply and angle-ply laminated plates t