Work in Progress – Establishing a Master Program in Cyber Physical Systems: Basic Findings and Future Perspectives

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper reports on the basic findings and future perspectives of a capacity building project funded by the European Union. The International Master of Science on Cyber Physical Systems (MS@CPS) is a collaborative project that aims to establish a master program in cyber physical systems (CPS). A consortium composed of nine partners proposed the project. Three partners are European and from Germany, UK and Sweden; while the other six partners are from the South Mediterranean region and include: Palestine, Jordan and Tunisia. The consortium is led by the University of Siegen in Germany who also manages the implementation of the work packages. CPS is an emerging engineering subject with significant economic and societal implications, which motivated the consortium to propose the establishment of a master program to offer educational and training opportunities at graduate level in the fields of CPS. In this paper, CPS as a field of study is introduced with an emphasis on its importance, especially with regard to meeting local needs. A brief description of the project is presented in conjunction with the methodology for developing the courses and their learning outcomes

Using GLP as Partial Replacement in Cement Mortars

For the last decade, recycled construction wastes were promoted to be reused in concrete manufacture process to achieve sustainability of structures. Recently, crushed glass has been investigated many researchers [1-9] as a partially replacement for coarse and fine aggregates, finally; cement. This study investigated the influence of both the mechanical behaviour and microstructure of cement mortar when partially replaced by powder glass. Here in, six mixes were design for six percentages of replacement; considered incrementally, each 5% (0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, and 25%) of cement weight. 36 mortar cubes and 18 prisms were cast and cured for 28 days. Then after, the specimens were tested in compression and indirect splitting tensile strength to determine their influence on mechanical properties. In addition, scanning electron microscope as well X-ray diffraction was used to examine their microstructure cement. The results showed that 20.5% increase in compressive strength at 7 days while at 28 days, the compressive strength increases insignificantly by value of 0.3% when using 5% GLP replacement. In addition, 46.9% increase was achieved in flexural strength at 28 days. Furthermore, the SEM micrographs observed some clear glass particles while the XRD clearly monitored the high count of silica and could not detect the calcium silicate that represents the amorphous part

Utilization of Water-Cooled and Air-Cooled Slag Aggregate in Concrete: A Solution to the Secular Economy

Aggregates are generally thought of as inert filler within a concrete mix, and a typical concrete mix is comprised of as much as 70–80% of them. They play an essential role in the properties of both fresh and hardened concrete. Nowadays, scientists are aiming to use waste materials, thereby replacing natural aggregates for economic and environmental considerations. This study investigates the effect of the utilization of steel slag by-product aggregates (air- and water-cooled slag) as concrete aggregates on the behavior characteristics of concrete. Various concrete mixtures, with different levels of replacement of slag aggregate (50, 75, and 100%), were conducted in order to find the optimum percentages to improve the microstructure and different properties of concrete (fresh and hardened). The results showed that increasing the fine aggregate replacement percentage led to a decrease in compressive strength values, in contrast with coarse aggregate replaced with slag aggregate. The steel slag aggregates showed potential to be used as replacement for natural aggregate with comparable compressive strength and acceptable workability