This study expands the state of the art in studies that assess torsional retrofit of reinforced concrete (RC) multi-cell box girders with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips. The torsional behavior of non-damaged and pre-damaged RC multi-cell box girder specimens externally retrofitted by CFRP strips was investigated through a series of laboratory experiments. It was found that retrofitting the pre-damaged specimens with CFRP strips increased the ultimate torsional capacity by more than 50% as compared to the un-damaged specimens subjected to equivalent retrofitting. This indicated that the retrofit has been less effective for the girder specimen that did not develop distortion beforehand as a result of pre-loading. From experimental observations, when the girder specimen was cracked and the transverse steel reinforcement bars started straining, the CFRP strips started to work more effectively and contributed together with the transverse steel reinforcement to resist torsion load. Additionally, Finite Element (FE) simulations were developed using Abaqus to model the torsional behavior of the retrofitted girders, the results of which were validated with the experimental data. With the numerical model, the effect of concrete compressive strength, transverse reinforcement spacing, and CFRP strip spacing were examined. The effectiveness of the CFRP strips in enhancing the torsional strength of the girder was found to increase with increasing the spacing between the transverse reinforcement.
The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) measures the reflected solar radiation in the ultraviolet and visible part in the spectral range that is between 270 and 500 nm, using two channels with a spectral resolution of about 0.5 nm. Ground-level tropospheric ozone is one of the air pollutants of most concern. In the troposphere, near the Earth's surface, human activities lead to ozone concentrations several times higher than the natural background level. To evaluate the ozone distribution over Iraq, the ozone data from OMI were analyzed using geostatistical techniques. Theoretical spherical models provided the best fit for all monthly experimental variograms. The parameters of these variograms (sill, range and nugget) wer
... Show MoreThe expansion in water projects implementations in Turkey and Syria becomes of great concern to the workers in the field of water resources management in Iraq. Such expansion with the absence of bi-lateral agreement between the three riparian countries of Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; Turkey, Syria and Iraq, is expected to lead to a substantially reduction of water inflow to the territories of Iraq. Accordingly, this study consists of two parts: first part is aiming to study the changes of the water inflow to the territory of Iraq, at Turkey and Syria borders, from 1953 to 2009; the results indicated that the annual mean inflow in Tigris River was decreased from 677 m3/sec to 526 m3/sec, after operating Turkey reserv
... Show MoreIn this work, the effect of the addition of bright nickel plating and silver carried out by the electroplating method has been studied, on the coating of copper nanoparticles on the copper base metal via the process of thermal evaporation. The improvement of the solar absorber using CuNP in combination with the bright nickel and silver was obtained to be better than copper nanoparticles individually. A bright nickel enhanced the absorbed thermal stability. Also, other optical properties, absorptions, and emissivity slightly decreased from (93% to 87%), while the existence of silver had a slight impact on absorption of about (86.50%). On the other hand, thermal conductivity was evaluated using hot disk analyzer. The results showed a good
... Show MoreResearchers dream of developing autonomous humanoid robots which behave/walk like a human being. Biped robots, although complex, have the greatest potential for use in human-centred environments such as the home or office. Studying biped robots is also important for understanding human locomotion and improving control strategies for prosthetic and orthotic limbs. Control systems of humans walking in cluttered environments are complex, however, and may involve multiple local controllers and commands from the cerebellum. Although biped robots have been of interest over the last four decades, no unified stability/balance criterion adopted for stabilization of miscellaneous walking/running modes of biped
This paper presents a novel idea as it investigates the rescue effect of the prey with fluctuation effect for the first time to propose a modified predator-prey model that forms a non-autonomous model. However, the approximation method is utilized to convert the non-autonomous model to an autonomous one by simplifying the mathematical analysis and following the dynamical behaviors. Some theoretical properties of the proposed autonomous model like the boundedness, stability, and Kolmogorov conditions are studied. This paper's analytical results demonstrate that the dynamic behaviors are globally stable and that the rescue effect improves the likelihood of coexistence compared to when there is no rescue impact. Furthermore, numerical simul
... Show MoreIt is necessary for police agencies both in the United States and elsewhere in the world to have rapid intervention units that carry out special tasks that regular police cannot handle, such as carrying out search warrants and arresting dangerous criminals, Armed robbery, release of hostages, terrorist incidents, mentally disturbed persons, and other special missions. They are supposed to be well trained, highly self-confident; working together, self-disciplined, and use the force to deal with the special situations they may face. Either there have been many cases in the United States of America against members of these units, personally or against the agencies, they work in because of excessive use of force in many cases that have been use
... Show MoreIn order to study the dynamic response of historical masonry structures, a scaled down brick masonry model constructed in civil engineering department at Baghdad University to simulate a part of a real case study, which is Alkifil historic minaret. Most of the previous researches about masonry structures try to understand the behavior of the masonry under seismic loading by experimental and numerical methods. In this paper, the masonry units (bricks) simulated in scale (S= 1/6) with the exact shape of the prototype bricks. Cementitious tile adhesive was selected to be the mortar for the modeling. The height of the model designed to be 1.5 m with a 0.5 m diameter. Detailed construction steps were presented in this paper. Experts buil
... Show MoreThe study is devoted to both static and earthquake response analysis of retaining structures acted upon by lateral earth pressure. Two main approaches were implemented in the analysis, namely, the Mononobe-Okabe analytical method and the numerical Finite element procedure as provided in the ready software ABAQUS with explicit dynamic method. A basic case study considered in the present work is the bridge approach retaining walls as a part of AL-Jadiriya bridge intersection to obtain the effects of the backfill and the ground water on the retaining wall response including displacement of the retaining structure in addition to the behavior of the fill material. Parametric studies were carried out to evaluate the effects of several factors
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