Non-prismatic reinforced concrete (RC) beams are widely used for various practical purposes, including enhancing architectural aesthetics and increasing the overall thickness in the support area above the column, which gives high assurance to services that this will not result in the distortion of construction features and can reduce heights. The hollow sections (recess) can also be used for the maintenance of large structural sections and the safe passage of utility lines of water, gas, telecommunications, electricity, etc. They are generally used in large and complex civil engineering works like bridges. This study conducted a numerical study using the commercial finite element software ANSYS version 15 for analysing RC beams, hollow longitudinally sectioned and retrofitted with carbon fibre reinforced polymers (CFRPs), which were subjected to concentrated vertical loads. The numerical analysis results on the simulated beam models were in excellent agreements with the previous experimental test results. This convergence was confirmed by a statistical analysis, which considered the correlation coefficients, individual arithmetic means and standard deviations for all the calculated deflections of the simulated beam models. A proposed numerical simulation model with the hypotheses can be considered suitable for modelling the behaviours of simple supported non-prismatic RC beams under vertical concentrated loads. The numerical results showed that altering the cross-section from solid to hollow could reduce the load carrying capacities of the beams by up to 53% and increase the corresponding deflections by up to 40%, respectively. Using steel pipes for making recesses could enhance the loading capacity by up to 56%, increase the ductility, and reduce the corresponding deflections by up to 30%, respectively. Finally, it was found that bonding the CFRP sheets in the lower middle tensile areas of the hollow beams could improve the resistance and reduce the deformations by up to 27%. The failure patterns for all the numerical models were shear failure. The cylinder compressive strength could be used as a mechanical parameter for modelling and assessing the structural behaviours of the beam models, as its increase could improve the load carrying capacities and reduce the deflections by 30–50%.
In this work, an estimation of the key rate of measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) protocol in free space was performed. The examined free space links included satellite-earth downlink, uplink and intersatellite link. Various attenuation effects were considered such as diffraction, atmosphere, turbulence and the efficiency of the detection system. Two cases were tested: asymptotic case with infinite number of decoy states and one-decoy state case. The estimated key rate showed the possibility of applying MDI-QKD in earth-satellite and intersatellite links, offering longer single link distance to be covered.
This study is pointed out to estimate the effectiveness of two solvents in the extraction and evaluating the active ingredients and their antioxidant activity as well as anti-cancer efficiency. Therefore, residues from four different Brassica vegetables viz. broccoli, Brussels sprout, cauliflower, and red cherry radish were extracted using two procedures methods: methanolic and water crude extracts. Methanol extracts showed the highest content of total phenolic (TP), total flavonoids (TF), and total tannins (TT) for broccoli and Brussels sprouts residues. Methanolic extract of broccoli and Brussels sprouts residues showed the highest DPPH· scavenging activity (IC50 = 15.39 and 18.64 µg/ml). The methanol and water ex
... Show MoreDue to a party's violation of his obligations or responsibilities indicated in the contract, many engineering projects confront extensive contractual disputes, which in turn need arbitration or other forms of dispute resolution, which negatively impact the project's outcome. Each contract has its terms for dispute resolution. Therefore, this paper aims to study the provisions for dispute resolution according to Iraqi (SBDW) and the JCT (SBC/Q2016) and also to show the extent of the difference between the two contracts in the application of these provisions. The methodology includes a detailed study of the dispute settlement provisions for both contracts with a comparative analysis to identify the differences in the appli
... Show MoreBecause of their Physico‐chemical characteristics and its composition, the development of new specific analytical methodologies to determine some highly polar pesticides are required. The reported methods demand long analysis time, expensive instruments and prior extraction of pesticide for detection. The current work presents a new flow injection analysis method combined with indirect photometric detection for the determination of Fosetyl‐Aluminum (Fosetyl‐Al) in commercial formulations, with rapid and highly accurate determination involving only construction of manifold system combined with photometric detector without need some of the pre‐treatments to the sample before the analysis such a
In this article, the casting method was used to prepare poly(methyl methacrylate)/hydroxyapatite (PMMA/HA) nanocomposite films incorporated with different contents (0.5, 1, and 1.5 wt%) of graphene nanoplatelets (Gnp). The chemical properties and surface morphology of the PMMA/HA blend and PMMA/HA/Gnp nanocomposite were characterized using FTIR, and SEM analysis. Besides, the thermal conductivity, dielectric and electrical properties at (1–107 Hz) of the PMMA/HA blend and PMMA/HA/Gnp composites were investigated. The structural analysis showed that the synthesized composites had a low agglomerated state, with multiple wrinkles of graphene flakes in the PMMA/HA blend. The thermal conductivity was improved by more than 35-fold its value for
... Show MoreThis study presents a novel, custom‑built fluorescence detector for the precise determination of chloride and iodide ions based on their quenching effect on fluorescein. The detection system incorporates eight blue LEDs irradiation sources arranged at 0–90° angles relative to twin solar cell detectors connected. Two fluorescence quenching strategies were developed. The injected‑mixture mode (IMFQ) exhibited linear ranges of 0.00–1.00 mM for Cl⁻ and 0.00–1.25 mM for I⁻, with detection limits of 20 µM and 10 µmol L⁻¹, respectively. The continuous‑flow mode (CFFQ) demonstrated superior sensitivity with a dispersion factor of 1.33, wider linear ranges (0.1–6.0 m
Protection study of the corrosion behavior of Copper surface was conducted with several concentrations of drug. Experimentally, voltammetric measurements were used to check the inhibition efficiency (% IE) in saline solution of 3.5% NaCl. The results showed an increase in the inhibition efficiency with increasing the concentration of the drug was 95.90%. Theoretical treatment of the drug in the gas phase was performed using the (hyperchem-8.07) program for molecular mechanics and semi-empirical computations. The (PM3) approach was used to determine the heat of formation (1H˚f), binding energy (1Eb), and total energy (ET
This research studies the comparison of deep neural network models and performance evaluation to predict the gold prices of time series, where the gold prices contain high fluctuations and non-linear patterns that are difficult to capture using traditional models, which makes predicting them a significant challenge. Therefore, the focus was on using deep learning models represented by (LSTM), (Bi-LSTM), (GRU) and (Bi-GRU). The results showed the superiority of the (Bi-GRU) model according to comparison criteria (MSE), (RMSE), (MAE), and (R∧2) compared to other models because it was able to understand the time patterns better by processing the data in both directions and provided superior performance, which indicates its effectiveness, eff
... Show More