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%.
In this study, the effect of fire flame on the punching shear strength of steel fiber reinforced concrete flat plates was experimentally investigated using nine half-scale specimens with dimensions of 1500×1500 mm and a total thickness of 100 mm. The main investigated variables comprised the steel fiber volume fraction 0, 1, and 1.5% and the burning steady state temperature 500 and 600 °C. The specimens were divided into three groups, each group consists of three specimens. The specimens in the first group were tested with no fire effect to be the reference specimens, while the others of the second and third groups were tested after being exposed to fire-flame effect. The adopted characteristics of the fire test were; (one hour) b
... Show MoreApplying load to a structural member may result in a bottle-shaped compression field especially when the width of the loading is less than the width of bearing concrete members. At the Building and Construction Department – the University of Technology-Iraq, series tests on fibre reinforced concrete specimens were carried out, subjected to compression forces at the top and bottom of the specimens to produce compression field. The effects of steel fibre content, concrete compressive strength, transverse tension reinforcement, the height of test specimen, and the ratio of the width of loading plate to specimen width were studied by testing a total of tenth normal strength concrete blocks with steel fibre and one normal s
... Show MoreThe shear strength of soil is one of the most important soil properties that should be identified before any foundation design. The presence of gypseous soil exacerbates foundation problems. In this research, an approach to forecasting shear strength parameters of gypseous soils based on basic soil properties was created using Artificial Neural Networks. Two models were built to forecast the cohesion and the angle of internal friction. Nine basic soil properties were used as inputs to both models for they were considered to have the most significant impact on soil shear strength, namely: depth, gypsum content, passing sieve no.200, liquid limit, plastic limit, plasticity index, water content, dry unit weight, and initial
... Show MoreSand dunes are spread in multiple places in the world especially in a desert area as a result of economic development and construction processes, there was a need to study the behavior of sand dunes and make it suitable for construction. This paper aims to study the effect of adding sodium silicate on the cohesion strength of sand dune and its behavior. The results show that the cohesion strength increase as a percentage of sodium silicate increase (addition 8% Sodium silicate show the higher cohesion) and the cohesion between sand dune particles increase excepted when using 10% sodium silicate the cohesion began to decrease. However, the effect of curing time is significant and shows
This research focuses on studying the effects of soil movement on the behavior of an existing pile driven in sandy soil. A physical model has been manufactured to investigate the effect of construction of an embankment adjacent to free head single pile driven in sand of dry unit weight of 13.5 kN/m3. The model pile of diameter (D) of 10 mm are tested under two conditions of loading: loaded axially and without load. The model piles are instrumented with strain gauges along the embedded length to measure strains resulting from the soil movement. The embankment loads are applied at distances of 2.5, 5, and 10D from the edge of the pile. The results obtained from the
The aim of this article is to study the dynamical behavior of an eco-epidemiological model. A prey-predator model comprising infectious disease in prey species and stage structure in predator species is suggested and studied. Presumed that the prey species growing logistically in the absence of predator and the ferocity process happened by Lotka-Volterra functional response. The existence, uniqueness, and boundedness of the solution of the model are investigated. The stability constraints of all equilibrium points are determined. The constraints of persistence of the model are established. The local bifurcation near every equilibrium point is analyzed. The global dynamics of the model are investigated numerically and confronted with the obt
... Show MorePractically, torsion is normally combined with flexure and shear actions. Even though, the behavior of reinforced concrete continuous beams under pure torsion is investigated in this study. It was performed on four RC continuous beams under pure torsion. In order to produce torsional moment on the external supports, an eccentric load was applied at various distances from the longitudinal axis of the RC beams until failure.
Variables considered in this study are absolute vertical displacement of the external supports, torsional moment’s capacity, angle of twist and first cracks occurrences. According to experimental results; when load eccentricity increased from 30cm to 60cm, the absolute vertical displacement i
... Show MoreThe aim of this paper is to determine the effect of internal marketing through three dimensions: vision, development, and reward - on organizational citizenship behavior in three private universities in Iraq. Organizations’ view of their members as internal customers could be made them more realistic in dealing with the reasons for leaving and going to other organizations. This can promote business organizations to build an organizational environment that contributes to making the organization look like the homeland of those workers. The research method is descriptive and analytical. The tool for data collection was the questionnaire. Statistical software (SPSS V.23 and AMOS V.23) was used to analyze the data. The research sample was r
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