This paper studies the behavior of reinforced Reactive Powder Concrete (RPC) two-way slabs under static and repeated load. The experimental program included testing six simply supported RPC two-way slabs of 1000 mm length, 1000 mm width, and 70 mm thickness. All the tested specimens were identical in their material properties, and reinforcement details except their steel fibers content. They were cast in three pairs, each one had a different steel fibers ratio (0.5 %, 1 %, and 1.5 %) respectively. In each pair, one specimen was tested under static load and the other under five cycles of repeated load (loading-unloading). Static test results revealed that increasing steel fibres volume fraction from 0.5 % to 1 % and from 1% to 1.5%,

Power-electronic converters are essential elements for the effective interconnection of renewable energy sources to the power grid, as well as to include energy storage units, vehicle charging stations, microgrids, etc. Converter models that provide an accurate representation of their wideband operation and interconnection with other active and passive grid components and systems are necessary for reliable steady state and transient analyses during normal or abnormal grid operating conditions. This paper introduces two Laplace domain-based approaches to model buck and boost DC-DC converters for electromagnetic transient studies. The first approach is an analytical one, where the converter is represented by a two-port admittance model via mo

In Iraq most of the small buildings deployed a conventional air conditioning technology which typically uses electrically driven compressor systems which exhibits several clear disadvantages such as high energy consumption, high electricity at peak loads. In this work a thermal performance of air conditioning system combined with a solar collector is investigated theoretically. The hybrid air conditioner consists of a semi hermetic compressor, water cooled shell and tube condenser, thermal expansion valve and coil with tank evaporator. The theoretical analysis included a simulation for the solar assisted air-conditioning system using EES software to analyze the effect of different parameters on the power consumption of c

Cooling towers is one of the most important unit in industry, they are used to dispose heat from cooling media used in the integrated units. The choice of the cooling media plays recently an important rule due to fresh-water scarcity. The use of saline as a cooling media become of growing interest, but the corrosion problem has to be taken in consideration. In this study the simultaneous effect of cooling tower operation parameters on the corrosion rate of mild-steel is considered. The role of NaCl content is found to be pronounced more than the working solution temperature and flowrate. The corrosion of mild-steel in these studied factors had shown an interesting result especially with the NaCl% content. Firstly, there was an increase in t

The dynamic development of computer and software technology in recent years was accompanied by the expansion and widespread implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) based methods in many aspects of human life. A prominent field where rapid progress was observed are high‐throughput methods in biology that generate big amounts of data that need to be processed and analyzed. Therefore, AI methods are more and more applied in the biomedical field, among others for RNA‐protein binding sites prediction, DNA sequence function prediction, protein‐protein interaction prediction, or biomedical image classification. Stem cells are widely used in biomedical research, e.g., leukemia or other disease studies. Our proposed approach of

Background: Dental caries is a localized, progressive destructive, largely irreversible microbial based disease of multifactorial nature; these factors include (host, microbes and food) they influence differently on the initiation and progression of dental caries. The aims of the study: was to evaluate the effect of smoking on salivary flow rate, secretory immunoglobulin (SIgA) level and viable count of mutans streptococci (M.S) bacteria in oral cavity and their relation to dental caries experience. Material and method: The samples were collected from 80 male students ranging in ages from 18-22 years old. Where they divided in to two groups, 40 non-smokers (control group) and 40 smokers (study group). Unstimulated salivary samples were c

This paper experimentally investigates the heating process of a hot water supply using a neural network implementation of a self-tuning PID controller on a microcontroller system. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm employed in system tuning proved very effective, as it is simple and fast optimization algorithm. The PSO method for the PID parameters is executed on the Matlab platform in order to put these parameters in the real-time digital PID controller, which was experimented with in a pilot study on a microcontroller platform. Instead of the traditional phase angle power control (PAPC) method, the Cycle by Cycle Power Control (CBCPC) method is implemented because it yields better power factor and eliminates harmonics