A novel demountable shear connector is proposed to link a concrete slab to steel sections in a way that resulting steel-concrete composite floor is demountable, i.e. it can be easily dismantled at the end of its service life. The proposed connectors consist of two parts: the first part is a hollow steel tube with internal threads at its lower end. The second part is a compatible partially threaded bolted stud. After linking the stud to the steel section, the hollow steel tube can be fastened over the threaded stud, which create a complete demountable shear connector. The connector is suitable for use in both composite bridges and buildings, and using cast in-situ slabs, precast solid slabs, or hollow-core precast slabs. A series of push-off

In this work, the effect of partial amounts of gases in gas mixture of a CW CO2 laser on the output power was investigated. Also their effect on the condition determining the glow-discharge self-sustaining required for pumping the active medium was studied. Two fit relations were derived to predict the output laser power and the electric field to unit pressure ratio as functions to the partial amounts of gases. Results presented in this work could be used fruitfully to determine some of the optimum operational conditions of glow-discharge low-power CW CO2 lasers.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new technology that separate the ‎control plane from the data plane. SDN provides a choice in automation and ‎programmability faster than traditional network. It supports the ‎Quality of Service (QoS) for video surveillance application. One of most ‎significant issues in video surveillance is how to find the best path for routing the packets ‎between the source (IP cameras) and destination (monitoring center). The ‎video surveillance system requires fast transmission and reliable delivery ‎and high QoS. To improve the QoS and to achieve the optimal path, the ‎SDN architecture is used in this paper. In addition, different routing algorithms are ‎used with different steps. First, we eva

An environmentally begnin second derivative spectrometric approach was developed for the estimation of the dissociation constants pKa(s) of metformin, a common anti-diabetic drug.  The ultraviolet spectra of the aqueous solution of metformin were measured at different acidities, then the second derivative of each spectrum was graphed. The overlaid second derivative graphs exhibited two isobestic points at 225.5 nm and 244 nm pointing out to the presence of two dissociation constants for metformin pKa1 and pKa2, respectively. The method was validated by evaluating the reproducibility of the acquired results by comparing the estimated values of the dissociation constants of two different strategies that show excellent matching. As we

As one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord

In general, path-planning problem is one of most important task in the field of robotics. This paper describes the path-planning problem of mobile robot based on various metaheuristic algorithms. The suitable collision free path of a robot must satisfies certain optimization criteria such as feasibility, minimum path length, safety and smoothness and so on. In this research, various three approaches namely, PSO, Firefly and proposed hybrid FFCPSO are applied in static, known environment to solve the global path-planning problem in three cases. The first case used single mobile robot, the second case used three independent mobile robots and the third case applied three follow up mobile robot.  Simulation results, whi

In this research, the removal of cadmium (Cd) from simulated wastewater was investigated by using a fixed bed bio-electrochemical reactor. The effects of the main controlling factors on the performance of the removal process such as applied cell voltage, initial Cd concentration, pH of the catholyte, and the mesh number of the cathode were investigated. The results showed that the applied cell voltage had the main impact on the removal efficiency of cadmium where increasing the applied voltage led to higher removal efficiency. Meanwhile increasing the applied voltage was found to be given lower current efficiency and higher energy consumption.  No significant effect of initial Cd concentration on the removal efficie

In this paper , an efficient new procedure is proposed to modify third –order iterative method obtained by Rostom and Fuad [Saeed. R. K. and Khthr. F.W. New third –order iterative method for solving nonlinear equations. J. Appl. Sci .7(2011): 916-921] , using three steps based on Newton equation , finite difference method and linear interpolation. Analysis of convergence is given to show the efficiency and the performance of the new method for solving nonlinear equations. The efficiency of the new method is demonstrated by numerical examples.