Finite Element Modelling of Reinforced Concrete Beam Strengthened with Embedded Steel Reinforcement Bars

The increased of loads on existing reinforced concrete infrastructure and the lack of initial design and construction will induce flexural and shear failure. Several methods have been introduced to increase the shear capacity of existing reinforced concrete elements with FRP, involving the use of plates or fabric externally bonded (EB) to the webs of the bridge beams, prestressed straps wrapped around the beams or bars mounted within grooves prepared in the near-surface mounted (NSM) technique. Typical Indonesian concrete bridges consisted main girders connected with diaphragm beams where the distance between those girders are very close. In particular case, where the webs of the beams are difficult to access, a novel approach is introduced, namely deep embedment (DE) method. Three reinforced concrete beam models are prepared for this study. One specimen is the control specimen and identified, as Beam-CS and the other two are the strengthened specimens and identified as Beam-SS-3EB and Beam-SS-5EB. All specimens have the same dimensions and reinforcement configuration. Specimen Beam-SS-3EB was strengthened with three rows of 6 mm embedded plain steel bars while specimen Beam-SS-5EB was strengthened with five rows of 6 mm plain steel bars. The results showed that element size significantly affects the load-displacement curve behaviour. The similarity of the hysteresis curve in the FE analysis using the 25 mm element size suggested a reasonably good agreement between the analytical calculation and the prediction result from the FE analysis. Furthermore, maximum reaction force for Beam-SS-3EB and Beam-SS-5EB were 30.30 kN and 31.77 kN, respectively, represents an increase of 17.67% and 23.29% compared to that of the Beam-CS

Synthesis and Characterization of Chitosan-Silica Membranes for Treating Hotel Wastewater Treatment as Affected by Mass of Poly Ethylene Glycol and Poly Vinyl Alcohol

Chitosan-Silica blended membranes were an attractive choice for the purification process because their porous size and morphology provide higher selectivity. In this study, the synthesis and characterization of chitosan-silica membranes were carried out with a mass variation of Poly Ethylene Glycol (PEG): 0,5; 2,5; 5 grams, Poly Vinyl Alcohol (PVA): 1, 2, 3 grams; and pressure 1, 2, 3 bars for the hotel wastewater treatment. The purpose of this study was to determine the characterization of chitosan-silica membranes obtained by SEM and tensile strength, and to determine the performance of membrane against the flux and rejection test with the effect of a mixture of PEG and PVA mass using raw materials in form of chitosan-silica. Tensile strength analysis showed that membrane with the highest tensile strength was 19,14 Mpa for PEG and 13,7 Mpa for PVA. The SEM test results showed a relatively small pore size of PEG 0,5 gram (0,061 ?m) and PVA 2 grams (0,0284 ?m). Flux and rejection results showed that membrane with 2,5 grams composition of PEG was the most effective in performance with the flux 18,19 L/m2.h and rejection elimination of BOD (50,76%), COD (46,09%) and TSS (48,00%). On the other hand, flux results showed that membrane with 3 grams composition of PVA was the most effective with the flux 20,13 L/m2.h and rejection elimination of BOD (62,84%), COD (64,73%) and TSS (38,40%). The characteristics of permeability, selectivity, and membrane pore statistics show that the silica membrane is an ultrafiltration membrane

Global Research Performance on the Design and Applications of Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems: A Bibliometric Analysis

There has been a significant contribution to scientific literature in the design and applications of Type-2 fuzzy logic systems (T2FLS). The T2FLSs found applications in many aspects of our daily lives, such as engineering, pure science, medicine and social sciences. The online web of science was searched to identify the 100 most frequently cited papers published on the design and application of T2FLS from 1980 to 2016. The articles were analyzed based on authorship, source title, country of origin, institution, document type, web of science category, and year of publication. The correlation between the average citation per year (ACY) and the total citation (TC) was analyzed. It was found that there is a strong relationship between the ACY and TC (r = 0.91643, P<0.01), based on the papers consider in this research.  The “Type -2 fuzzy sets made simple” authored by Mendel and John (2002), published in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems received the highest TC as well as the ACY. The future trend in this research domain was also analyzed. The present analysis may serve as a guide for selecting qualitative literature especially to the beginners in the field of T2FLS

Front Matter

Statements of fact and opinion in the articles in the Journal of Applied Materials and Technology are those of the respective authors and contributors and not of Journal of Applied Materials and Technology or the institution of Applied Materials and Technology Society and Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Riau. Neither Applied Materials and Technology Society and Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Riau nor Journal of Applied Materials and Technology make any representation, express or implied, in respect of the accuracy of the material in this journal and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made by the reader should make her or his own evaluation as to the appropriateness or otherwise of any experimental technique described

The Oriented Attachment Crystal Growth Model in Hydrothermal Synthesis of Magnetite (Fe3O4) Nanoparticles

The magnetite nanoparticles (Fe3O4) are very promising nanomaterials to be applied as drug delivery due to their excellent superparamagnetic, biocompatibility and easily modified surface properties. Those properties are influenced by the structure and size of the material which can be controlled by studying the evolution of crystal growth. The purpose of this research is to study the evolution of crystal growth of magnetite nanoparticles in the hydrothermal system and determine the crystal growth kinetics using the Oriented Attachment Growth model. Magnetite nanoparticles were synthesized using a hydrothermal method from FeCl3, citrate, urea and polyethylene glycol at 210?C for 1 - 12 hours at a various concentration of FeCl3 (0.05 M, 0.10 M, and 0.15 M). The characterizations were conducted by X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), Particle size analyzer (PSA), and Vibrating Sample Magnetometer (VSM). The XRD difractogram  indicated that the magnetite was begun to form at 3.5 hours synthesis. The crystallinity and the crystal size of magnetite rose with reaction time. The diameter of magnetite crystals was in the range of 9.4-30 nm. Characterization by TEM showed that the particles were formed from a smaller particles which were then agglomerated. The PSA characterization showed that the distribution of diameter size enlarged with the enhancement of  concentrations. VSM result showed that the magnetite nanoparticle has superparamagnetic properties. The magnetite crystal growth can be fitted by the Oriented Attachment Growth model with an error of 29%

Simultaneous Distribution Network Reconfiguration and Optimal Placement of Distributed Generation

A reliable, eco- and nature-friendly operation has been the major concern of modern power system (PS). To improve the PS reliability and reduce the adverse environmental effect of conventional thermal generation facilities, renewable energy based distributed generation (RDG) are being enormously integrated to low and medium voltage distribution networks (DN). However, if these systems are not properly deployed, the reliability and stability of the PS will be endangered and its quality can be dreadfully jeopardized. Among the measures taken to avoid such is optimizing the location and size of each RDG unit in the DNs. These networks are generally operated in a radial configuration, though they can be reconfigured to other topologies to achieve certain objectives. Both RDG placement/sizing and DN reconfiguration are highly non-linear, multi-objective, constrained and combinatorial optimization problems. In this study, a hybrid of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and real-coded Genetic Algorithm (GA) techniques is employed for DN reconfiguration and optimal allocation (size and location) of multiple RDG units in primary DNs simultaneously. The objectives of the proposed technique are active power loss reduction, voltage profile (VP) and feeder load balancing (LB) improvement. It is carried out subject to some technical constraints, with the search space being the set of DN branches, DG sizes and potential locations.  To ascertain the effectiveness of the technique, it is implemented on standard IEEE 16-bus, 33-bus and 69-bus test DNs. The proposed algorithm is implemented in MATLAB and MATPOWER environments. It is observed the power loss, voltage deviation and LB are found to be reduced by 32.84%, 12.33% and 24.03% of their respective inherent values in the biggest system when the system is reconfigured only. With the optimized RDGs placed in the reconfigured systems, a further reductions of 46.27%, 25.92% and 36.65% are observed respectively. &nbsp