An Analytic Study on Evolution of Social Spaces

Social spaces have confronted huge changes through ages but they date back to the history of social life of man. Due to social characteristics, human being in his life demand for social life based on exchanging thoughts, culture and ideas. Therefore, with respect to massive changes, man familiarizes himself with concepts such as society, gathering and reunion and can benefit from a community spirit. With regard to the important role of city halls in social spaces, it is worth mentioning that the history of these spaces and also the necessity of their creation, with respect to current social demands and using new methods to help people participate in city affairs and taking responsibility for cities issues should also taken into account

An Analytic Study on Evolution of Social Spaces

Social spaces have confronted huge changes through ages but they date back to the history of social life of man. Due to social characteristics, human being in his life demand for social life based on exchanging thoughts, culture and ideas. Therefore, with respect to massive changes, man familiarizes himself with concepts such as society, gathering and reunion and can benefit from a community spirit. With regard to the important role of city halls in social spaces, it is worth mentioning that the history of these spaces and also the necessity of their creation, with respect to current social demands and using new methods to help people participate in city affairs and taking responsibility for cities issues should also taken into account

Introduction to Monitoring of Bridge Infrastructure Using Soft Computing Techniques

More than a billion structures exist on our planet comprising a million bridges. A number of these infrastructures are near to or have already exceeded their design life and maintaining their health condition is an engineering optimization problem. Besides, these assets are damage-prone during their service life. This is due to the fact that different external loads induced by the environmental effects, overloading, blast loads, wind excitations, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters can disturb the serviceability and integrity of these structures. To overcome such bottlenecks, structural health monitoring (SHM) systems have been used to guarantee the safe functioning of structures to make satisfactory decisions on structural maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation. However, conventional SHM approaches such as virtual inspections cannot be used for structural continuous monitoring, real-time and online assessment. Therefore, soft computing techniques can be significantly used to mitigate the aforesaid concerns by handling the qualitative analysis of the complex real world behavior. This chapter aims to introduce the optimized SHM-based soft computing techniques of bridge structures through artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms in order to illustrate the performance of advanced bridge monitoring approaches, which are required to maintain the health condition of infrastructures as well as to protect human lives

Application of Agricultural Wastes Activated Carbon for Dye Removal – An Overview

Dyes are an important class of pollutants and can even be identified by the human eyes. Disposal of dyes in precious water resources must be avoided especially those that are not easily biodegradable, however, and for that various treatment technologies are in use. Among various methods adsorption occupies a prominent place in dye removal. The growing demand for efficient and low-cost treatment methods and the importance of adsorption has given rise to agricultural waste. This review highlights and provides an overview of these activated carbons prepared by non-woody and woody materials and their application for dyes removal. From a comprehensive literature review, it was found that many researchers used non-woody material as activated carbons to removal dye contaminants

A Damage Detection Approach in the Era of Industry 4.0 Using the Relationship between Circular Economy, Data Mining, and Artificial Intelligence

Over the last decades, the emergence of new technologies has inspired a paradigm shift for the fourth industrial revolution. For example, circular economy, data mining, and artificial intelligence (AI), which are multidisciplinary topics, have recently attracted industrial and academic interests. Sustainable structural health monitoring (SHM) also concerns the continuous structural assessment of civil, mechanical, aerospace, and industrial structures to upgrade conventional SHM systems. A damage detection approach inspired by the principles of data mining with the adoption of circular-economic thinking is proposed in this study. In addition, vibration characteristics of a composite bridge deck structure are employed as inputs of AI algorithms. Likewise, an artificial neural network (ANN) integrated with a genetic algorithm (GA) was also developed for detecting the damage. GA was applied to define the initial weights of the neural network. To aid the aim, a range of damage scenarios was generated and the achieved outcomes confirm the feasibility of the developed method in the fault diagnosis procedure. Several data mining techniques were also employed to compare the performance of the developed model. It is concluded that the ANN integrated with GA presents a relatively fitting capacity in the detection of damage severity

Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase (MTHFR) Gene C677T Polymorphism Is Associated with Coronary Atherosclerosis Disease in a Sample of Iranian Patients

Background: Several studies showed that elevated plasma homocysteine level is a risk factor for coronary artery disease (CAD). A common polymorphism C677T of methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) gene is reported to be associated with decreased enzyme activity and increased blood homocysteine level.Methods: This study evaluated the association between C677T polymorphism and blood homocysteine level with CAD in 100 patients compared to 100 normal controls.Results: Higher prevalence of the C677T polymorphism as well as elevated level in blood homosysteine were observed in Iranian CAD cases compared to the normal control. The C677T MTHFR common polymorphism was significantly associated with CAD, supported by a P value 0.032 and Chi-square equal to 6.87.Conclusions: The TT genotype of MTHFR gene was attributed to increased blood homocysteine level in patients compared to T/C and C/C genotypes in studied Iranian cases. This study shows the advantage of testing C677T polymorphism in affected patients as a risk factor for coronary artery disease

Effective Parameters, Equilibrium, and Kinetics of Fluoride Adsorption on Prosopis cineraria and Syzygium cumini Leaves

This study was designed to present a facile and effective biosorbent from Prosopis cineraria and Syzygium cumini leave (PCL and SCL) for fluoride removal. The test was done in batch mode and the effect of contact time (5, 25, 60, 90, and 120 min), initial fluoride concentration level (3, 5, 8, and 12 mg/L), and biosorbent dose (1, 3, 5, 10, and 25 g/L) on the biosorption process were examined. The optimum conditions for the maximum fluoride removal were occurred at 1 g/L biosorbent dose and contact time of 120 (for PCL) and 90 min (for SCL). The results suggested that the pseudo-second-order and Langmuir isotherm models described the experimental data well. According to the Langmuir model, the maximum adsorption capacity of fluoride for PCL and SCL was attained 11.52 and 7.4 mg/g, respectively. Based on Boyd and intra-diffusion models, the biosorption of fluoride onto PCL and SCL was mainly controlled by film-diffusion. The study revealed the potential use of PCL and SCL as two new effective biosorbents for the removal of fluoride from aqueous solution. © 2019 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 38: S429–S440, 2019

Assessment of Polyacrylamide Based Co-Polymers Enhanced by Functional Group Modifications with Regards to Salinity and Hardness

This research aims to test four new polymers for their stability under high salinity/high hardness conditions for their possible use in polymer flooding to improve oil recovery from hydrocarbon reservoirs. The four sulfonated based polyacrylamide co-polymers were FLOCOMB C7035; SUPERPUSHER SAV55; THERMOASSOCIATIF; and AN132 VHM which are basically sulfonated polyacrylamide copolymers of AM (acrylamide) with AMPS (2-Acrylamido-2-Methylpropane Sulfonate). AN132 VHM has a molecular weight of 9–11 million Daltons with 32 mol % degree of sulfonation. SUPERPUSHER SAV55 mainly has about 35 mol % sulfonation degree and a molecular weight of 9–11 million Daltons. FLOCOMB C7035, in addition, has undergone post-hydrolysis step to increase polydispersity and molecular weight above 18 million Daltons but it has a sulfonation degree much lower than 32 mol %. THERMOASSOCIATIF has a molecular weight lower than 12 million Daltons and a medium sulfonation degree of around 32 mol %, and also contains LCST (lower critical solution temperature) type block, which is responsible for its thermoassociative characteristics. This paper discusses the rheological behavior of these polymers in aqueous solutions (100–4500 ppm) with NaCl (0.1–10 wt %) measured at 25 °C. The effect of hardness was investigated by preparing a CaCl2-NaCl solution of same ionic strength as the 5 wt % of NaCl. In summary, it can be concluded that the rheological behavior of the newly modified co-polymers was in general agreement to the existing polymers, except that THERMOASSOCIATIF polymers showed unique behavior, which could possibly make them a better candidate for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) application in high salinity conditions. The other three polymers, on the other hand, are better candidates for EOR applications in reservoirs containing high divalent ions. These results are expected to be helpful in selecting and screening the polymers for an EOR application

Silica chemically bonded N-propyl kriptofix 21 and 22 with immobilized palladium nanoparticles for solid phase extraction and preconcentration of some metal ions

Silica gel chemically bonded N-propyl kriptofix 21 (SBNPK 21) and N-propyl kriptofix 22 (SBNPK 22) and subsequently immobilized with palladium nanoparticles (PNP-SBNPK 21 and PNP-SBNPK 22) to produce two new complexing lipophilic materials. Then these novel sorbents were applied for the enrichment of some metal ions and their subsequent determination by flame atomic absorption spectroscopy (FAAS). The influences of the variables including pH, amount of solid phase, sample flow rate, eluent conditions and sample volume on the metal ion recoveries were investigated. The detection limit of proposed method was in the interval 2.1-2.3 and 1.7-2.8 ng mL(-1) for PNP-SBNPK 21 and PNP-SBNPK 22 respectively, while the preconcentration factor was 80 for two sorbents. The relative standard deviations of recoveries were between 1.23-1.31 and 1.28-1.49 for PNP-SBNPK 21 and PNP-SBNPK 22 respectively. The method has high sorption-preconcentration efficiency even in the presence of various interfering ions. Due to the reasonable selectivity of proposed method, the relative standard deviation of recoveries of all understudied metal ions in some complicated matrices was less than 3.0%. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Effect of Aging, Antioxidant, and Mono- and Divalent Ions at High Temperature on the Rheology of New Polyacrylamide-Based Co-Polymers

The viscosity of four new polymers was investigated for the effect of aging at high temperature, with varying degrees of salinity and hardness. The four sulfonated based polyacrylamide co-polymers were FLOCOMB C7035; AN132 VHM; SUPERPUSHER SAV55; and THERMOASSOCIATIF copolymers. All polymer samples were aged at 80 °C for varying times (from zero to at least 90 days) with and without isobutyl alcohol (IBA) as an antioxidant. To see the effect of divalent ions on the polymer solution viscosity, parallel experiments were performed in a mixture of CaCl2-NaCl of the same ionic strength as 5 wt % NaCl. The polymers without IBA showed severe viscosity reduction after aging for 90 days in both types of preparation (5 wt % NaCl or CaCl2-NaCl). In the presence of IBA, viscosity was increased when aging time was increased for 5 wt % NaCl. In CaCl2-NaCl, on the other hand, a viscosity reduction was observed as aging time was increased. This behavior was observed for all polymers except AN132 VHM