Water absorbent polymers (WAP) are new component in producing building materials. They provide internal curing which reduces autogenous cracking, eliminates autogenous shrinkage, mortar strength increased, enhance early age strength to withstand strain, improve the durability, introduce higher early age compressive strength, have higher performance and reduce the effect of insufficient external curing. This research used different percent of polymer balls to choose the percent that provides good development in compressive strength with time for both water and air curing. The water absorption polymer balls in this research have the ability to absorb water and after usage in concrete they spill out the water (internal curing) and shri

Back ground: Glass ionomer materials lack resistance to wear and pressure and are susceptible to moisture during the initial stages of setting and dehydration. So this study was done to assess diametral tensile strength and microhardness of glass ionomer reinforced by different amounts of hydroxyapatite. Materials and methods: In this study a hydroxyapatite material was added to glass monomer cement at different ratios: 10%, 15%, 20%, 25% and 30% (by weight). The diametral tensile strength test described by the British standard specification for zinc polycarboxylate cement was used in this study and the microhardness test was performed using Vickers microhardness testing machine and the microhardness values were calculated and statistical c

Background: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of zirconia different surface treatments (primer, sandblast with 50μmAl2O3, Er,Cr:YSGG laser) on shear bond strength between zirconia surface and resin cement. Material and methods: Sixty presintered Y-TZP zirconia cylinder specimens (IPS e.max ZirCAD, Ivoclar vivadent) will be fabricated and sintered in high temperature furnace of (1500 C for 8 hours) according to manufacturer’s instructions to the selected size and shape of (5mm. in diameter and 6mm in height). All specimens were ground flat using 600.800.1000.1200, aluminum oxide abrasive paper to obtain a standardized surface roughness. Surface roughness values were then recorded in µm using surface roughness tester (profi

The present study illustrates observations, record accurate description and discussion about the behavior of twelve tested, simply supported, precast, prestressed, segmental, concrete beams with different segment numbers exposed to high fire temperatures of 300°C, 500°C, and 700°C. The test program included thermal tests by using a furnace manufactured for this purpose to expose to high burning temperature (fire flame) nine beams which were loaded with sustaining dead load throughout the burning process. The beams were divided into three groups depending on the precast segments number. All had an identical total length of 3150mm but each had different segment number (9, 7, and 5 segments), in other words, different segment length

Curing of concrete is the maintenance of a satisfactory moisture content and temperature for a
period of time immediately following placing so the desired properties are developed. Accelerated
curing is advantages where early strength gain in concrete is important. The expose of concrete
specimens to the accelerated curing conditions which permit the specimens to develop a significant
portion of their ultimate strength within a period of time (1-2 days), depends on the method of the
curing cycle.Three accelerated curing test methods are adopted in this study. These are warm water,
autogenous and proposed test methods. The results of this study has shown good correlation
between the accelerated strength especially for

Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with

In this study, six square reinforced concrete flat plates with dimensions of (1500×1500×100) mm were tested under a concentrated load applied on a column located at the center of the slabs. One of these slabs was the control specimen, whereas, in the others, steel angles (steel collars) were used, fixed at the connection region between the slab and the column to investigate the effect of the presence of these collars on punching shear strength. Five thicknesses were used (4, 5, 6, 8, 10mm) with constant legs of angles (75×75) mm of the steel collars to investigate the effects on the punching shear resistance with respect to the control slab. The results of the experimental study show that the punching shear resistance increased b