Applied Research Journal
Volume:2 Issue: 11, Nov 2016

The Experimental investigations of strengthening reinforced concrete Tbeams by external prestressed tendons are presented. The tested beams are partially strengthening span instead of strengthening whole span technique as convention. The test variable is chosen to study the effects of tendons depth levels relative to beam top fiber expressed as depth ratio (eccentricity) which is equal to depth of the strand to height of the section. Therefore, this study has been conducted to show the ability of using partial span strengthening and the effectiveness of increasing depth ratio of the external strands. Four identical reinforced concrete T-beams were tested up to failure. One of these beams (without strengthening) was used as a reference or control beam. While, the other three beams were partially strengthened (only 83% of the effective length) with two tendons. Tested beams were strengthening by fixed tendons in variable level and configuration by jacking at a constant stress equal to 600 MPa. All beams were tested up to failure by applying two concentrated loads at the third points. The test results show the ability of using partially strengthening technique to improve and enhance an existing beam. The important parameters that affect the behavior, such as failure mode, crack pattern, strain profile, and deflection at mid span are evaluated and discussed. Generally, test results shows that the deflection under service load decreases and the load capacity of the strengthened beams increase with increasing in the depth ratio of external strands.

Experimental test results were presented in this paper from a series of consolidated undrains (CU) triaxial tests, composite soil specimen 76 mm high and 38 mm in diameter, for unreinforced soft clay soil and/or soft clay reinforced with granular column. With area replacement ratio a􀭰(0.13) and with various slenderness ratio (L/d) for partially penetration column=1.8, 3.6, and for full penetration column=5.4, where L:length of column, d:diameter of column).Tests showed that, the full penetrating granular column provides higher values of bearing capacity than partially penetrating columns and this values decrease as increase confining pressure. The excess pore water pressure, the reduction in settlement ratio (β), and the effective internal friction angle (Ҩ') decreased as increase in (L/d) ratio. The results show that the undrain young's modulus (Eu), the stress concentration ratio (n), and the cohesion (C) of soil reinforced increase as (L/d) ratio increase. The M (M: slope of critical state line (CSL))value increases and Г, λ decreases as (L/d) ratio increase of reinforced composite soil, the state parameter (ξ) decrease as increase confining pressure. Also found that the effect of (L/d) ratio seems to be more pronounced at small confining pressure.

The increasing use of modern monitoring devices that generate a vast amount of data requires huge storage capacity. Also, advances in digital medical imaging technologies, particularly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized tomography (CT) scans have resulted in a substantial increase in the size of data sets. In order to decrease storage costs of medical images or make them suitable and ready for transmission through common communication channels, the medical image's volume must be reduced. So an effective Medical image compression method is required. Medical imaging poses the greatest challenge of having compression algorithms that reduce the loss of fidelity as much as possible so as not to contribute to diagnostic errors and yet have high compression rates for reduced storage and transmission time. This paper presents an efficient technique for the compression of medical image. In this technique, different mixed transforms based on vector quantization (VQ) algorithm is proposed. The compression algorithms were implemented and tested using multiwavelet, wavelet, and slantlet transforms to form the proposed method based on mixed transforms. Then vector quantization technique was employed to extract the mixed transform coefficients. Simulation results using the MATLAB package showed that the proposed methods gave a high compression ratio (CR) and higher peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) values for different MRI images and CT scans compared with other available methods. For example, the compression of MRI images gave a result of CR equal to 14.6 with PSNR of 54.4 dB.

In recent years membrane bioreactors filtration is increasingly used in wastewater treatment to enhance the quality of wastewater. The main problem in preventing the widespread use of membrane bioreactor is its congestion which has a severe impact on output flux to time ratio. If solid suspensions with high concentrations exist in the wastewater, this influence will be even more severe. In addition to the suspended solids in the liquid mixture, Extracellular polymeric materials (EPS) and soluble microbial products (SMP) are also known as basic microbial products that cause membrane fouling. EPS can be calculated within and on the membrane which increases the viscosity of suspended solids in the liquid mixture and increases filtration resistance. SMPs cannot penetrate the pores of the ultrafiltration membrane due to the limited size of the pores which would cause fouling in membrane processes. According to the above issues, providing a model that indicates the properties and conditions of formation and destruction of SMP and EPS at the same time seems necessary. In this paper, CFD modelling of biological fouling in membrane bioreactor is provided using Fluent software.

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) employs a mechanism that creates a communication between the brain and the exterior world using the brain signals. In other words, BCI creates a way to connect the brain with the outside environment. First of all, the brain signals are recorded and then it is handled to transform brain activity to its corresponding commands. Basically, there are two kinds of BCI systems, Invasive and Noninvasive, which assist the client in controlling many types of applications. Such ability can become so helpful for patients who are suffering from severemotor function issue. The methodology that makes BCIs have a high performance based on signal processing approach is utilized by feature extraction and translation of Electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns. In this work Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is used to remove artifacts and also power spectral density (PSD) is extracted from sensorimotor rhythms which are considered as a feature. This will become a foundation for Support Vector Machine (SVM) translation algorithm of EEG patterns. This work has been analyzed and evaluated using computer by means of MATLAB R2016a. The proposed approach gave a result equal to 98.2%.