Unsaturated soil can raise many geotechnical problems upon wetting and drying resulting in swelling upon wetting and collapsing (shrinkage) in drying and changing in the soil shear strength. The classical principles of saturated soil are often not suitable in explaining these phenomena. In this study, expansive  soil (bentonite and sand) were tested in different water contents and dry unit weight chosen from the compaction curve to examine the effect of water content change on soil properties (swelling pressure, expansion index, shear strength (soil cohesion) and soil suction by the filter paper method). The physical properties of these soils were studied by conducting series of tests in laboratory. Fitting methods

Traffic loading and environmental factors are among the most serious variables that cause the spoilage of flexible pavements and lead to a decrease in their design life. The objective of this study is to investigate the influence of axle load raise and the change in resilient modulus on the flexible pavement design life. Locally, Highway geometric design code for Iraqi building code has assign certain admissible maximum load limits per every axle truck type that should not be overrun. In this paper nine different axle truck loads (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16) tons, single axle with dual tire and, and two different resilient moduli of asphalt pavement were chosen. The evaluation was carried out assuming high temperature to represent

The effect of considering the third dimension in mass concrete members on its cracking behavior is investigated in this study. The investigation includes thermal and structural analyses of mass concrete structures. From thermal analysis, the actual temperature distribution throughout the mass concrete body was obtained due to the generation of heat as a result of cement hydration in addition to the ambient circumstances. This was performed via solving the differential equations of heat conduction and convection using the finite element method. The finite element method was also implemented in the structural analysis adopting the concept of initial strain problem. Drying shrinkage volume changes were calculated using the procedure suggested

Background: Adjustment of any premature occlusal contact of any zirconia restoration requires its polishing or glazing in order to restore the smoothness of the restoration. The objective of this in vitro study was to evaluate the effects of different polishing systems and glazing on the surface roughness of full-contour zirconia. Material and methods: Forty disks (diameter: 8 mm, thickness: 6.4 mm) were prepared from pre-sintered full-contoured zirconia block; they were colored and sintered in a high-temperature furnace at 1500ËšC for 8 hours. The specimens were then leveled and finished using grinding and polishing machine and adjusted using diamond disk. The specimens were then randomly divided into four groups (n=10), group I involves

The purpose of this study is designate quenching and tempering heat treatment by using Taguchi technique to determine optimal factors of heat treatment (austenitizing temperature, percentage of nanoparticles, type of base media, nanoparticles type and soaking time) for increasing hardness, wear rate and impact energy properties of 420 martensitic stainless steel. An (L₁₈) orthogonal array was chosen for the design of experiment. The optimum process parameters were determined by using signal-to-noise ratio (larger is better) criterion for hardness and impact energy while (Smaller is better) criterion was for the wear rate. The importance levels of process parameters that effect on hardness, wear rate and impact energy propertie

In this work, the effect of partial amounts of gases in gas mixture of a CW CO2 laser on the output power was investigated. Also their effect on the condition determining the glow-discharge self-sustaining required for pumping the active medium was studied. Two fit relations were derived to predict the output laser power and the electric field to unit pressure ratio as functions to the partial amounts of gases. Results presented in this work could be used fruitfully to determine some of the optimum operational conditions of glow-discharge low-power CW CO2 lasers.