A bolted–welded hybrid demountable shear connector for use in deconstructable steel–concrete composite buildings and bridges was proposed. The hybrid connector consisted of a partially threaded stud, which was welded on the flange of a steel section, and a machined steel tube with compatible geometry, which was bolted on the stud. Four standard pushout tests according to Eurocode 4 were carried out to assess the shear performance of the hybrid connector. The experimental results show that the initial stiffness, shear resistance, and slip capacity of the proposed connector were higher than those of traditional welded studs. The hybrid connector was a ductile connector, according to Eurocode 4, with slip capacity higher than 6 mm. A nonli

The concept of the active contour model has been extensively utilized in the segmentation and analysis of images. This technology has been effectively employed in identifying the contours in object recognition, computer graphics and vision, biomedical processing of images that is normal images or medical images such as Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), X-rays, plus Ultrasound imaging. Three colleagues, Kass, Witkin and Terzopoulos developed this energy, lessening “Active Contour Models” (equally identified as Snake) back in 1987. Being curved in nature, snakes are characterized in an image field and are capable of being set in motion by external and internal forces within image data and the curve itself in that order. The present s

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of corrosive environment (corrosive ferric chloride of 1, 2, 5, 6% wt. at room temperature), immersion period of (48, 72, 96, 120, 144 hours), and surface roughness on pitting corrosion characteristics and use the data to build an artificial neural network and test its ability to predict the depth and intensity of pitting corrosion in a variety of conditions. Pit density and depth were calculated using a pitting corrosion test on carbon steel (C-4130). Pitting corrosion experimental tests were used to develop artificial neural network (ANN) models for predicting pitting corrosion characteristics. It was found that artificial neural network models were shown to be

Due to the energy crisis and the stringent environmental regulations, diesel engines are offering good hope for automotive vehicles. However, a lot of work is needed to reduce the diesel exhaust emissions and give the way for full utilization of the diesel fuel’s excellent characteristics.

A kind of cetane number improver has been proposed and tested to be used with diesel fuel as                 ameans of reducing exhaust emissions. The addition of (2-ethylhexyl nitrate) was designed to raise fuel cetane number to three stages, 50, 52 and 55 compared to the used conventional diesel fuel whose CN was 48.5. The addition of CN improver results in the decre

Cloud computing provides huge amount of area for storage of the data, but with an increase of number of users and size of their data, cloud storage environment faces earnest problem such as saving storage space, managing this large data, security and privacy of data. To save space in cloud storage one of the important methods is data deduplication, it is one of the compression technique that allows only one copy of the data to be saved and eliminate the extra copies. To offer security and privacy of the sensitive data while supporting the deduplication, In this work attacks that exploit the hybrid cloud deduplication have been identified, allowing an attacker to gain access to the files of other users based on very small hash signatures of

In the present work a comparative study for thermal and electrical performance of different hybrid photovoltaic/thermal collectors designs for Iraq climate conditions have been carried out. Four different types of air based hybrid PV/T collectors have been manufactured and tested. Three collectors consist of four main parts namely, channel duct, glass cover, axial fan to circulate air and two PV panels in parallel connection. The measured parameters are, the temperature of the upper and the lower surfaces of the PV panels, air temperature along the collector, air flow rate, pressure drop, power produced by solar cell, and climate conditions such as wind speed, solar radiation and ambient temperature. The thermal and hydraulic performances o

In cognitive radio system, the spectrum sensing has a major challenge in needing a sensing method, which has a high detection capability with reduced complexity. In this paper, a low-cost hybrid spectrum sensing method with an optimized detection performance based on energy and cyclostationary detectors is proposed. The method is designed such that at high signal-to-noise ratio SNR values, energy detector is used alone to perform the detection. At low SNR values, cyclostationary detector with reduced complexity may be employed to support the accurate detection. The complexity reduction is done in two ways: through reducing the number of sensing samples used in the autocorrelation process in the time domain and through using the Slid

 In this paper, the human robotic leg which can be represented mathematically by single input-single output (SISO) nonlinear differential model with one degree of freedom, is analyzed and then a simple hybrid neural fuzzy controller is designed to improve the performance of this human robotic leg model. This controller consists from SISO fuzzy proportional derivative (FPD) controller with nine rules summing with single node neural integral derivative (NID) controller with nonlinear function. The Matlab simulation results for nonlinear robotic leg model with the suggested controller showed that the efficiency of this controller when compared with the results of the leg model that is controlled by PI+2D, PD+NID, and F

New complexes were synthesized with Schiff base tetradentate ligand (L). The ligand was synthesized by the condensation reaction of the dimedone with 2-hydroxybenzohydrazide. The formula of complexes [M(L) (H2O)2].Cl2, where M represents Mn(II), Ni(II) Cu(II), [Co(L)Cl.H2O]Cl and [Zn(L)(H2O)2]Cl2.2H2O. The ligand was identified using m.p., UV-Vis, FT-IR, Mass, 1H-NMR, and C.H.N. These complexes were characterized using techniques including infrared, UV-Vis absorption, magnetic susceptibility, molar conductivity, elemental analyses, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), chloride content determination using Mohr’s method, and atomic absorption spectroscopy. The measurements revealed that the complexes are electrolytic. FT-IR results dem