Highly plastic soils exhibit unfavorited properties upon saturation, which produce different defects in engineering structures. Attempts were made by researchers to proffer solutions to these defects by experimenting in practical ways. This included various materials that could possibly improve the soil engineering properties and reduce environmental hazards. This paper investigates the strength behavior of highly plastic clay stabilized with brick dust. The brick dust contents were 10%, 20%, and 30% by dry weight of soil. A series of linear shrinkage and unconfined compression tests were carried out to study the effect of brick dust on the quantitative amount of shrinkage experienced by highly plastic clay and the undrained shear strength. The effect of curing on soil shear strength was included in this paper. It was found that the critical behavior of highly plastic soil can be mitigated by mixing with 20% or 30% of brick dust. The undrained shear strength of highly plastic clay mixed with brick dust increased with the increase of brick dust content up to 20%. It was affected by the curing period. The best improvement was achieved when the optimum content of brick dust was 20%. Finally, seven days of curing improved the undrained shear strength with over 100%.
In the geotechnical and terramechanical engineering applications, precise understandings are yet to be established on the off-road structures interacting with complex soil profiles. Several theoretical and experimental approaches have been used to measure the ultimate bearing capacity of the layered soil, but with a significant level of differences depending on the failure mechanisms assumed. Furthermore, local displacement fields in layered soils are not yet studied well. Here, the bearing capacity of a dense sand layer overlying loose sand beneath a rigid beam is studied under the plain-strain condition. The study employs using digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) and finite element method (FEM) simulations. In the FEM, an experiment
... Show MoreWhen optimizing the performance of neural network-based chatbots, determining the optimizer is one of the most important aspects. Optimizers primarily control the adjustment of model parameters such as weight and bias to minimize a loss function during training. Adaptive optimizers such as ADAM have become a standard choice and are widely used for their invariant parameter updates' magnitudes concerning gradient scale variations, but often pose generalization problems. Alternatively, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with Momentum and the extension of ADAM, the ADAMW, offers several advantages. This study aims to compare and examine the effects of these optimizers on the chatbot CST dataset. The effectiveness of each optimizer is evaluat
... Show MoreObjective: The study aimed to identify the adolescents' family meal eating patterns, and find out the relationship between adolescents' family meal eating patterns and their weight control behaviors. Methodology: A descriptive study was conducted on impact of adolescents' family meal eating patterns upon their weight control behaviors in secondary schools at Baghdad city, starting from 20th of April 2013 to the end of October 2014. Non- probability (purposive) sample of 1254 adolescents were chosen from secondary schools of both sides of Al-Karkh and Al-Russafa sectors. Data was collected through a specially
Objective: The study aims to determine the effectiveness of the continuing nursing education
program on nursing staffs knowledge in kidney transplantation unit and to find out the relationship
between nursing staffs knowledge and demographic characteristics (age, gender, education level, and
years of experiences in kidney transplantation unit).
Methodology: A quasiexperemental design (One-group Pretest - Posttest design) was carried out in
kidney transplantation units at Baghdad Teaching Hospitals, from December 2011 to July 2012. A nonprobability
(purposive sample) of (16) nurses were selected from kidney transplant units at Baghdad
teaching hospitals, the choice was based on the study criteria. The data were collec
This paper presents ABAQUS simulations of fully encased composite columns, aiming to examine the behavior of a composite column system under different load conditions, namely concentric, eccentric with 25 mm eccentricity, and flexural loading. The numerical results are validated with the experimental results obtained for columns subjected to static loads. A new loading condition with a 50 mm eccentricity is simulated to obtain additional data points for constructing the interaction diagram of load-moment curves, in an attempt to investigate the load-moment behavior for a reference column with a steel I-section and a column with a GFRP I-section. The result comparison shows that the experimental data align closely with the simulation
... Show MoreSeveral adipokines are produced and secreted from adipose tissue, such as retinol binding protein-4, which triggers metabolic syndromes and insulin resistance. Retinol binding protein-4 transfers vitamin A or retinol in the blood. Higher levels of retinol binding protein-4 are interrelated with progress of metabolic disease, comprising obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes mellitus. The present study investigates the role of retinol-binding protein-4 levels in type 2 diabetic Iraqi patients with metabolic syndrome. Sixty type 2 diabetic patients aged 40–53 years were examined. Of these 30 patients has metabolic syndrome and 30 without metabolic syndrome. The patients sampled were from the National Diabetes Center/ Mustansiriyah
... Show MoreAbstract
The research problem focuses on studying the interest of the Medical City Department of the Ministry of Health in improving the creative thinking skills of the administrative leadership through parallel & comprehensive thinking according to the of six thinking hats strategy. The research sample consisted of (170) administrative leaders in the upper & middle organizational levels, The questionnaire was used as a main tool for data collection, In addition to the observation & Interview, The research sought to answer the following questions: What is the extent to which the administrative leadership (Tpp & middle) in the organization investigated the concept of the six thinkin
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