Over the last few decades, fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) has been increasingly used in strengthening different structural concrete members. The main objective of this research is to study the influence of curvature on the performance of curved soffit reinforced concrete (RC) bridge girders that have been strengthened with carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP). This experimental program was designed to evaluate the effect of concavity and soffit curvature on the CFRP laminate utilization and load capacity, compared to flat soffit RC beams strengthened with the same CFRP system. Accordingly, five beams, 2.7 m in length and having the same degree of soffit curvature (20 mm per 1 meter) extending over 2 meters of the span length, were tested under three-point monotonic static loading up to failure. CFRP pre-cured laminates were used for external strengthening in flexure. It was observed that 20 mm/m degree of curvature reduced the load-carrying capacity of strengthened concavely curved RC beams by 15.9 – 17.8%.
To assess cultural competence among nursing students from nine countries to provide an international perspective on cultural competence.
A descriptive, cross‐sectional design.
A convenience sample of 2,163 nursing students from nine countries was surveyed using the Cultural Capacity Scale from April to November 2016.
The study found a moderate range of cultural competence among the students. The ability to teach and guide other nursing colleagues to displ
Biometrics is widely used with security systems nowadays; each biometric modality can be useful and has distinctive properties that provide uniqueness and ambiguity for security systems especially in communication and network technologies. This paper is about using biometric features of fingerprint, which is called (minutiae) to cipher a text message and ensure safe arrival of data at receiver end. The classical cryptosystems (Caesar, Vigenère, etc.) became obsolete methods for encryption because of the high-performance machines which focusing on repetition of the key in their attacks to break the cipher. Several Researchers of cryptography give efforts to modify and develop Vigenère cipher by enhancing its weaknesses.
... Show MoreThis study describes how fuzzy logic control FLC can be applied to sonars of mobile robot. The fuzzy logic approach has effects on the navigation of mobile robots in a partially known environment that are used in different industrial and society applications. The fuzzy logic provides a mechanism for combining sensor data from all sonar sensors which present different information. The FLC approach is achieved by means of Fuzzy Decision Making method type of fuzzy logic controller. The proposed controller is responsible for the obstacle avoidance of the mobile robot while traveling through a map from a home point to a goal point. The FLC is built as a subprogram based on the intelligent architecture (IA). The software program uses th
... Show MoreThis paper presents the design of a longitudinal controller for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This paper proposed the dual loop (inner-outer loop) control based on the intelligent algorithm. The inner feedback loop controller is a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) to provide robust (adaptive) stability. In contrast, the outer loop controller is based on Fuzzy-PID (Proportional, Integral, and Derivative) algorithm to provide reference signal tracking. The proposed dual controller is to control the position (altitude) and velocity (airspeed) of an aircraft. An adaptive Unscented Kalman Filter (AUKF) is employed to track the reference signal and is decreased the Gaussian noise. The mathematical model of aircraft
... Show MoreHiding technique for dynamic encryption text using encoding table and symmetric encryption method (AES algorithm) is presented in this paper. The encoding table is generated dynamically from MSB of the cover image points that used as the first phase of encryption. The Harris corner point algorithm is applied on cover image to generate the corner points which are used to generate dynamic AES key to second phase of text encryption. The embedded process in the LSB for the image pixels except the Harris corner points for more robust. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme have embedding quality, error-free text recovery, and high value in PSNR.
Experimental and numerical investigations of the centrifugal pump performance at non-cavitating and cavitating flow conditions were carried out in the present study. Experiments were performed by applying a vacuum to a closed-loop system to investigate the effects of the net positive suction head available (NPSHa), flow rate, water temperature and pump speed on the centrifugal pump performance. Accordingly, many of the important parameters concerning cavitation phenomenon were calculated. Also, the noise which is accompanied by cavitation was measured. Numerical analysis was implemented for two phase flow (the water and its vapor) using a 2-D simulation by ANSYS FLUENT software to investigate the internal flow of centrifugal pump under c
... Show MoreImage databases are increasing exponentially because of rapid developments in social networking and digital technologies. To search these databases, an efficient search technique is required. CBIR is considered one of these techniques. This paper presents a multistage CBIR to address the computational cost issues while reasonably preserving accuracy. In the presented work, the first stage acts as a filter that passes images to the next stage based on SKTP, which is the first time used in the CBIR domain. While in the second stage, LBP and Canny edge detectors are employed for extracting texture and shape features from the query image and images in the newly constructed database. The p