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

The differential protection of power transformers appears to be more difficult than any type of protection for any other part or element in a power system. Such difficulties arise from the existence of the magnetizing inrush phenomenon. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize between inrush current and the current arise from internal faults. In this paper, two approaches based on wavelet packet transform (WPT) and S-transform (ST) are applied to recognize different types of currents following in the transformer. In WPT approach, the selection of optimal mother wavelet and the optimal number of resolution is carried out using minimum description length (MDL) criteria before taking the decision for the extraction features from the WPT tree

Dielectric barrier discharges (DBD) can be described as the presence of contact with the discharge of one or more insulating layers located between two cylindrical or flat electrodes connected to an AC/pulse dc power supply. In this work, the properties of the plasma generated by dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) system without and with a glass insulator were studied. The plasma was generated at a constant voltage of 4 kV and fixed distance between the electrodes of 5 mm, and with a variable flow rate of argon gas (0.5, 1, 1.5, 2 and 2.5) L/min. The emission spectra of the DBD plasmas at different flow rates of argon gas have been recorded. Boltzmann plot method was used to calculate the plasma electron temperature (Te), and Stark broadeni

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.

Cancer is in general not a result of an abnormality of a single gene but a consequence of changes in many genes, it is therefore of great importance to understand the roles of different oncogenic and tumor suppressor pathways in tumorigenesis. In recent years, there have been many computational models developed to study the genetic alterations of different pathways in the evolutionary process of cancer. However, most of the methods are knowledge-based enrichment analyses and inflexible to analyze user-defined pathways or gene sets. In this paper, we develop a nonparametric and data-driven approach to testing for the dynamic changes of pathways over the cancer progression. Our method is based on an expansion and refinement of the pathway bei

     In this work, the switching nonlinear dynamics of a Fabry-Perot etalon are studied. The method used to complete the solution of the differential equations for the nonlinear medium. The Debye relaxation equations solved numerically to predict the behavior of the cavity for modulated input power. The response of the cavity filled with materials of different response time is depicted. For a material with a response time equal to = 50 ns, the cavity switches after about (100 ns). Notice that there is always a finite time delay before the cavity switches. The switch up time is much longer than the cavity build-up time of the corresponding linear cavity which was found to be of the order of a few round-trip ti

A medical- service platform is a mobile application through which patients are provided with doctor’s diagnoses based on information gleaned from medical images. The content of these diagnostic results must not be illegitimately altered during transmission and must be returned to the correct patient. In this paper, we present a solution to these problems using blind, reversible, and fragile watermarking based on authentication of the host image. In our proposed algorithm, the binary version of the Bose_Chaudhuri_Hocquengham (BCH) code for patient medical report (PMR) and binary patient medical image (PMI) after fuzzy exclusive or (F-XoR) are used to produce the patient's unique mark using secret sharing schema (SSS). The patient’s un

An innovative two-step noncatalytic esterifcation technique was proposed to synthesize alkyl esters from free fatty acids simulated in waste cooking oil, as a pretreatment process for biodiesel production, without adding any catalyst under normal conditions of pressure and temperature. The efect of methanol:oil molar ratio, reaction time, mixing rate, and reaction temperature were investigated. The results confrmed that the conversion of the reaction was increased when increasing the methanol molar ratio and decreased in prolonged reaction temperature. High conversion (94.545%) was successfully achieved at optimized conditions of 115:1, 65:1 methanol:oil molar ratio in the frst step and second step, respectively, other conditions i