Improving the Soft Clay Using Seashell and Eggshell for Road Construction

Farming residues like eggshells and Sea residues like seashells have turned into a well-known choice for enhancement of soft soils because of their expense viability and natural cordiality, making them a suitable choice for accomplishing sustainability in the construction sector. Soft clay soils have relatively low bearing capacity and high consolidation settlement. For this reason, the construction of the subgrade in soft clay soils has met many obstacles. Expensive and traditional solutions are utilized in some projects, which usually encourage the idea of removing and replacing soft soils. Instead, land improvement is lately the best way to solve this problem. This paper aims to decrease the use of lime as the most common stabilizers utilized for soft soils; use recycled waste materials like seashell and eggshell powder is the novel objective of this study. California bearing ratio tests were conducted to examine some changes in the engineering properties of treated soils with waste seashell and eggshell powder with different percentages (2%, 4%, 6%, 8%, 10%, 12%, 14%, 16%, 18% and 20%) by dry weight of soil. The results show the inclusion of seashell and eggshell powder increased the CBR ratio of soft clay soil. The influence of adding seashell powder on soft clay soil is more effective than eggshell powder in road construction but finally, both of them can be used as a waste natural stabilizer to increase the CBR ratio of soft clay soil

Surface Treatments for Concrete Under Physical Salt Attack

Physical salt attack (PSA) is a key deterioration mechanism for concrete structures in contact with salt-rich media. Yet, procedures and techniques for protecting and repairing concrete affected by PSA are not adequately addressed in the technical literature. Therefore, in this study, three surface coatings of concrete were tested to determine their ability to withstand conditions stimulating to PSA. The treatments were selected to achieve either a single function such as acting as a membrane layer or hydrophobic agent, or combined pore blocking and water repelling functions. Coatings were applied on a concrete mixture typically used for residential foundations in Canada. Mass change was used as a measure to quantify the damage, in addition to microscopy and mineralogical analyses to elucidate the damage mechanisms. The results showed that the damage in deteriorating specimens was due to a combination of physical and chemical sulfate attacks. Also, epoxy and ethyl silicate were effective at protecting concrete from sodium sulfate damage while silane was not

MINARET: A Recommendation Framework for Scientific Reviewers

International audienceWe are witnessing a continuous growth in the size of scientific communities and the number of scientific publications. This phenomenon requires a continuous effort for ensuring the quality of publications and a healthy scientific evaluation process. Peer reviewing is the de facto mechanism to assess the quality of scientific work. For journal editors, managing an efficient and effective manuscript peer review process is not a straightforward task. In particular, a main component in the journal editors' role is, for each submitted manuscript, to ensure selecting adequate reviewers who need to be: 1) Matching on their research interests with the topic of the submission, 2) Fair in their evaluation of the submission, i.e., no conflict of interest with the authors, 3) Qualified in terms of various aspects including scientific impact, previous review/authorship experience for the journal , quality of the reviews, etc. Thus, manually selecting and assessing the adequate reviewers is becoming tedious and time consuming task. We demonstrate MINARET, a recommendation framework for selecting scientific reviewers. The framework facilitates the job of journal editors for conducting an efficient and effective scientific review process. The framework exploits the valuable information available on the modern scholarly Websites (e.g., Google Scholar, ACM DL, DBLP, Publons) for identifying candidate reviewers relevant to the topic of the manuscript, filtering them (e.g. excluding those with potential conflict of interest), and ranking them based on several metrics configured by the editor (user). The framework extracts the required information for the recommendation process from the online resources on-the-fly which ensures the output recommendations to be dynamic and based on up-to-date information

Behavior of Collapsible Soils Improved by Fly Ash and Cement Kiln Dust

Collapsible soils are metastable soils characterized by voids inside their building, at grain sizes ranging from silt to fine sand. On wetting, they collapse producing distortions that might cause failure of structures. In this study, addition to the natural collapsible soil, an artificial collapsible soil was prepared with the exact properties of the natural one taken from the deposit to avoid the remodel during transfer. Then, both the natural and artificial soil samples were stabilized with fly ash and cement kiln dust with several percentages. Kaolin particles were used to prepare the artificial samples with low density to represent the metastable soil structure. The fly ash and cement kiln dust were used in several percentages 5%, 10% and 15% to demonstrate the effect of using these stabilizing agents on Odometer test. The addition of fly ash (up to 15%) to the natural or artificial soil resulted in a decrease in the collapse potential (CP) from 15.4% to 4.4 % and from 13.8% to 2.6%, respectively. The obtained results showed that treatment of collapsing soils (natural and artificial) with CKD resulted in a reduction of collapse potential from 15.4% to 0.72% and from 13.8% to 0.95%, respectively. The results showed a significant improvement of the stabilized collapsible soil over the non-stabilized one whether treated by using fly ash or CKD. Additionally, CKD showed more effectiveness than fly ash in all the undergone tests

Slotted Reinforced Concrete Beam-Column Connection: State-of-the-Art Review

Research on reinforced concrete (RC) beam-column connections has significantly increased during the past few decades. Interest in this topic is related to the importance of beam-column connections in maintaining the integrity of the whole structure. The slotted RC beam-column connection was investigated as promising low damage beam-column connection replacement for conventional design. A slotted RC beam consists of a conventional RC beam, modified with a narrow vertical slot adjacent to the face of the column that runs approximately three-quarters of the beam depth. This study reviews the literature on the mechanics and design of slotted beams, illustrating the works of various researchers on developing and modifying this innovative system. Then, the research progress in the behavior of slotted RC beams is briefly described, in chronological order, to place each contribution in a wider context. Extremely promising structural performance was observed due to minimum beam elongation, non-tearing action, minimum cracks, high energy dissipation, and stable hysteresis response. At the end of the study, a list of the main gaps that need further investigation and recommendations to fill out these gaps are provided