Highly plastic soils exhibit unfavorited properties upon saturation, which produce different defects in engineering structures. Attempts were made by researchers to proffer solutions to these defects by experimenting in practical ways. This included various materials that could possibly improve the soil engineering properties and reduce environmental hazards. This paper investigates the strength behavior of highly plastic clay stabilized with brick dust. The brick dust contents were 10%, 20%, and 30% by dry weight of soil. A series of linear shrinkage and unconfined compression tests were carried out to study the effect of brick dust on the quantitative amount of shrinkage experienced by highly plastic clay and the undrained shear strength. The effect of curing on soil shear strength was included in this paper. It was found that the critical behavior of highly plastic soil can be mitigated by mixing with 20% or 30% of brick dust. The undrained shear strength of highly plastic clay mixed with brick dust increased with the increase of brick dust content up to 20%. It was affected by the curing period. The best improvement was achieved when the optimum content of brick dust was 20%. Finally, seven days of curing improved the undrained shear strength with over 100%.
When the guard honey bees, Apis mellifera L., form a clump at the hive entrance or on the flight board, the oriental hornet, Vespa orientails L., either creeps toward the clump or hovers over it in order to take a bee. Once the hornet creeps, only few bees facing the hornet become alert, rock their heads and antennae, open their wings, and take a posture of defense. The rest of the clump stays listless without any signal of concern. However, the clump stays dense and the defending bees do not detach themselves neither from the rest of the clump nor from each other. For this reason, it is very difficult for the hornet to grab a bee unless the latter makes a “mistake” by detaching herself from other adjacent bees. If the hornet grabs s
... Show MoreIn this paper, a methodology is presented for determining the stress and strain in structural concrete sections, also, for estimating the ultimate combination of axial forces and bending moments that produce failure. The structural concrete member may have a cross-section with an arbitrary configuration, the concrete region may consist of a set of subregions having different characteristics (i.e., different grades of concretes, or initially identical, but working with different stress-strain diagrams due to the effect of indirect reinforcement or the effect of confinement, etc.). This methodology is considering the tensile strain softening and tension stiffening of concrete in additio
Water absorbent polymers (WAP) are new component in producing building materials. They provide internal curing which reduces autogenous cracking, eliminates autogenous shrinkage, mortar strength increased, enhance early age strength to withstand strain, improve the durability, introduce higher early age compressive strength, have higher performance and reduce the effect of insufficient external curing. This research used different percent of polymer balls to choose the percent that provides good development in compressive strength with time for both water and air curing. The water absorption polymer balls in this research have the ability to absorb water and after usage in concrete they spill out the water (internal curing) and shri
... Show MoreSoil-structure frictional resistance is an important parameter in the design of many foundation systems. The soil-structure interface area is responsible for load transferring from the structure to the surrounding soil. The mobilized shaft resistance of axially loaded, long slender pile embedded in dense, dry sand is experimentally and numerically analyzed when subjected to pullout force. Experimental setup including an instrumented model pile while the finite element method is used as a numerical analysis tool. The hypoplasticity model is used to model the soil adjacent to and surrounding the pile by using ABAQUS FEA (6.17.1). The soil-structure interface behavior depends on many factors, but mainly on the interface soi
... Show MoreBackground: This study was formulated to compare the effect of 5%hydrofluoric acid in comparison to 37%phosphoric acid with and without the application of silane on bond strength of composite to porcelain. Materials and Methods: Specimen preparation was divided in to two phases, metal-disks fabrication (8mm-diameter and 4mm-thickness) and ceramic veneering. Thirty two specimens were prepared, sandblasted with 50 μm aluminum oxide, and divided into four groups of eight samples. Groups I and III were etched with 37%phosphoric acid while groups II and IV were etched with 5%hydrofluoric acid; and groups I and II were silaneted while groups III and IV were not. Heliobond, and resin composite were applied to each specimen using a plastic transpa
... Show MoreEmpirical equations for estimating thickening time and compressive strength of bentonitic - class "G" cement slurries were derived as a function of water to cement ratio and apparent viscosity (for any ratios). How the presence of such an equations easily extract the thickening time and compressive strength values of the oil field saves time without reference to the untreated control laboratory tests such as pressurized consistometer for thickening time test and Hydraulic Cement Mortars including water bath ( 24 hours ) for compressive strength test those may have more than one day.