The main objective of this study is to characterize the main factors which may affect the behavior of segmental prestressed concrete beams comprised of multi segments. The 3-D finite element program ABAQUS was utilized. The experimental work was conducted on twelve simply supported segmental prestressed concrete beams divided into three groups depending on the precast segments number. They all had an identical total length of 3150mm, but each had different segment numbers (9, 7, and 5 segments), in other words, different segment lengths. To simulate the genuine fire disasters, nine beams were exposed to high-temperature flame for one hour, the selected temperatures were 300°C (572°F), 500°C (932°F) and 700°C (1292°F) as recomm

In this work, an inventive photovoltaic evaporative cooling (PV/EC) hybrid system was constructed and experimentally investigated. The PV/EC hybrid system has the prosperous advantage of producing electrical energy and cooling the PV panel besides providing cooled-humid air. Two cooling techniques were utilized: backside evaporative cooling (case #1) and combined backside evaporative cooling with a front-side water spray technique (case #2). The water spraying on the front side of the PV panel is intermittent to minimize water and power consumption depending on the PV panel temperature. In addition, two pad thicknesses of 5 cm and 10 cm were investigated at three different water flow rates of 1, 2, and 3 lpm. In Case #1,

This study concerns the removal of a trihydrate antibiotic (Amoxicillin) from synthetically contaminated water by adsorption on modified bentonite. The bentonite was modified using hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (HTAB), which turned it from a hydrophilic to a hydrophobic material. The effects of different parameters were studied in batch experiments. These parameters were contact time, solution pH, agitation speed, initial concentration (C0) of the contaminant, and adsorbent dosage. Maximum removal of amoxicillin (93 %) was achieved at contact time = 240 min, pH = 10, agitation speed = 200 rpm, initial concentration = 30 ppm, and adsorbent dosage = 3 g bentonite per 1L of pollutant solution. The characterization of the adsorbent, modi

Understanding, promoting, and teaching media literacy is an important societal challenge. STEM educators are increasingly looking to incorporate 21st century skills such as media literacy into core subject education. In this paper we investigate how undergraduate Computer Science (CS) students can learn media literacy as a by-product of collaborative video tutorial production. The paper presents a study of 34 third-year CS undergraduates who, as part of their learning, were each asked to produce three video tutorials on Raspberry Pi programming, using a collaborative video production tool for mobile phones (Bootlegger). We provide results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the production process and resulting video tutorials,

This paper proposes a novel finite-time generalized proportional integral observer (FTGPIO) based a sliding mode control (SMC) scheme for the tracking control problem of high order uncertain systems subject to fast time-varying disturbances. For this purpose, the construction of the controller consists of two consecutive steps. First, the novel FTGPIO is designed to observe unmeasurable plant dynamics states and disturbance with its higher time derivatives in finite time rather than infinite time as in the standard GPIO. In the FTGPO estimator, the finite time convergence rate of estimations is well achieved, whereas the convergence rate of estimations by classical GPIO is asymptotic and slow. Secondly, on the basis of the finite and fast e

     This paper describes the application of consensus optimization for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) system. Consensus algorithm is usually conducted within a certain number of iterations for a given graph topology. Nevertheless, the best Number of Iterations (NOI) to reach consensus is varied in accordance with any change in number of nodes or other parameters of . graph topology. As a result, a time consuming trial and error procedure will necessary be applied
to obtain best NOI. The implementation of an intellig ent optimization can effectively help to get the optimal NOI. The performance of the consensus algorithm has considerably been improved by the inclusion of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). As a case s

This paper presents the ability to use cheap adsorbent (corn leaf) for the removal of Malachite Green (MG) dye from its aqueous solution. A batch mode was used to study several factors, dye concentration (50-150) ppm, adsorbent dosage (0.5-2.5) g/L, contact time (1-4) day, pH (2-10), and temperature (30-60)   The results indicated that the removal efficiency increases with the increase of adsorbent dosage and contact time, while inversely proportional to the increase in pH and temperature. An SEM device characterized the adsorbent corn leaves. The adsorption's resulting data were in agreement with Freundlich isotherm according to the regression analysis, and the kinetics data followed pseudo-first-order kinetic with a correlation