In Australia, most of the existing buildings were designed before the release of the Australian standard for earthquake actions in 2007. Therefore, many existing buildings in Australia lack adequate seismic design, and their seismic performance must be assessed. The recent earthquake that struck Mansfield, Victoria near Melbourne elevated the need to produce fragility curves for existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Australia. Fragility curves are frequently utilized to assess buildings’ seismic performance and it is defined as the demand probability surpassing capacity at a given intensity level. Numerous factors can influence the results of the fragility assessment of RC buildings. Among the most important factors that can affe

As asphalt concrete wearing course (ACWC) is the top layer in the pavement structure, the material should be able to sustain stresses caused by direct traffic loading. The objective of this study is to evaluate the influence of aggregate gradation and mineral filler type on Marshall Properties.  A detailed laboratory study is carried out by preparing asphalt mixtures specimens using locally available materials including asphalt binder (40-50) penetration grade, two types of aggregate gradation representing SCRB and ROAD NOTE 31 specifications and two types of  mineral filler including limestone dust and coal fly ash. Four types of mixtures were prepared and tested. The first type included SCRB specification and

The deep learning algorithm has recently achieved a lot of success, especially in the field of computer vision. This research aims to describe the classification method applied to the dataset of multiple types of images (Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images and non-SAR images). In such a classification, transfer learning was used followed by fine-tuning methods. Besides, pre-trained architectures were used on the known image database ImageNet. The model VGG16 was indeed used as a feature extractor and a new classifier was trained based on extracted features.The input data mainly focused on the dataset consist of five classes including the SAR images class (houses) and the non-SAR images classes (Cats, Dogs, Horses, and Humans). The Conv

 The performance of the Indian wheat varieties (PBW34, PBW343 and WH542) was compared with the local varieties (Tamose – 2 and Abu Ghareeb).      The experiment was conducted during two seasons first 2000-2001 and second 2001-2002 at AL- Twaitha experimental station , middle of Iraq.         The results showed that (Tamose – 2) exceeded the other varieties in plant height and heading date in the two seasons, while WH542 gave the lowest plant height.  PBW34 variety showed a significant increase in 1000 grain weight followed by PBW343 in the second season. Moreover, PBW34 and PBW343 gave the highest average of 50 spike weight in the second season.&nbsp

This research concerns study the crack growth in the wall of pipes made of low carbon steel under the impact load and using the effect of hygrothermal (rate of moisture 50% and 50℃ temperature). The environmental conditions were controlled using high accuracy digital control with sensors. The pipe have a crack already. The test was performed and on two type of specimens, one have length of 100cm and other have length 50cm. The results were, when the humidity was applied to the pipe, the crack would enhance to growth (i.e. the number of cycles needed to growth the crack will reduce). In addition, when the temperature was increase the number of cycles needed to growth the crack are reduced because the effect of heat on the mechanical pro

This paper introduces an experimental study on the behavior of confined concrete filled aluminum tubular (CFT) column to improve strength design, ductility and durability of concrete composite structures under concentrically loaded in compression to failure. To achieve this: seven column specimens with same concrete diameter 100mm and without steel reinforcement have been examined through experimental testing, which are used to study the effects of the thickness of the aluminum tube encased concrete ( thickness : 0mm, 2mm, 3mm, 4mm and 5mm with same length of column 450mm), length of column (thickness 5mm and length of column 700mm) and durability (thickness 5mm and length of column 450mm) on the structural behavior of &

Two dimensional meso-scale concrete modeling was used in finite element analysis of plain concrete beam subjected to bending. The plane stress 4-noded quadrilateral elements were utilized to model coarse aggregate, cement mortar. The effect of aggregate fraction distribution, and pores percent of the total area – resulting from air voids entrapped in concrete during placement on the behavior of plain concrete beam in flexural was detected. Aggregate size fractions were randomly distributed across the profile area of the beam. Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) was employed to treat the discontinuities problems result from double phases of concrete and cracking that faced during the finite element analysis of concrete beam. Crac

A particular solution of the two and three dimensional unsteady state thermal or mass diffusion equation is obtained by introducing a combination of variables of the form,
η = (x+y) / √ct , and η = (x+y+z) / √ct, for two and three dimensional equations
respectively. And the corresponding solutions are,
θ (t,x,y) = θ₀ erfc (x+y)/√8ct and θ( t,x,y,z) =θ₀ erfc (x+y+z/√12ct)

Laboratory studies were conducted at the biological control unit, college of Agriculture, University of Baghdad to evaluate some biological aspects of the predator Chilocorus bipustulatus (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae), which is considered one of the most important predators on many insect pests, especially the scale insect, Parlatoria blanchardi, (Homoptera: Diaspididae) on date palms. The results showed that biological parameters of the predator were varied according to different degree of temperature. Egg incubation period was significantly different and reached to 7.5 and 5.44 day at 25 and 30°C respectively, Fertility was the same 100% at both temperature degrees. Larval growth periods were 17.41 and 16.12 day as well as the mortality du