Corrosion assessment on reinforced concrete and its service life prediction

Deterioration of structural concrete may be caused either by chemical or physical effects. Corrosion of embedded steel is a major cause of deterioration of concrete structures at the present time. This lead to structural weakening due to loss of steel cross-section, surface staining, cracking or spalling and delamination of concrete and then gradually reduces the service life of the reinforced concrete structures. The most biggest problem is concerned with the structural integrity and safety of reinforced concrete structures by reducing the load carrying capacity. This project was to assess the degree of corrosion on reinforced concrete structure and estimating the residual service life. It was conducted based on electrochemical methods. These methods include galvanostatic pulse method and linear polarization method. A Non-Destructive Test techniques called GalvaPulse was used in this study. These equipments allow us to determine the degree of corrosion, rate of corrosion and interpret the result in corrosion mapping. From the results, assessment on the validation of corrosion in short and long terms by using predictive models are discussed

Architecture and Design of Medical Processor Units for Medical Networks

This paper introduces analogical and deductive methodologies for the design medical processor units (MPUs). From the study of evolution of numerous earlier processors, we derive the basis for the architecture of MPUs. These specialized processors perform unique medical functions encoded as medical operational codes (mopcs). From a pragmatic perspective, MPUs function very close to CPUs. Both processors have unique operation codes that command the hardware to perform a distinct chain of subprocesses upon operands and generate a specific result unique to the opcode and the operand(s). In medical environments, MPU decodes the mopcs and executes a series of medical sub-processes and sends out secondary commands to the medical machine. Whereas operands in a typical computer system are numerical and logical entities, the operands in medical machine are objects such as such as patients, blood samples, tissues, operating rooms, medical staff, medical bills, patient payments, etc. We follow the functional overlap between the two processes and evolve the design of medical computer systems and networks.Comment: 17 page

Who Spends More Online? The Influence of Time, Usage Variety, and Privacy Concern on Online Spending

The paper tests the influence of adoption time, online time, usage variety, and privacy concern on online spending. Findings support the hypothesis that online time, adoption time, and usage variety, the three dimensions of Internet usage experience, have a positive and significant influence on the amount of money consumers spend online, and privacy concern has a negative and significant influence. The control variables included in the model are gender, age, education, and income. Gender, age, and education did not influence online spending. However, income has a significant effect on online spending. Theoretical and strategic implications and recommendations for future research are presented

Fight Sitting with Movement

Today, Americans spend an average of 13 hours per day sitting. Sitting for as little as two continuous hours increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, back and neck pain, and other orthopedic problems. This project contains 8 YouTube videos presented in an engaging, educational and detailed manner to show individuals what they can do to combat prolonged sitting. The videos focus on moving the body’s joints through their normal ranges of motion & improving an individual’s NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis)https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1455/thumbnail.jp

Qualitative analysis of dynamic equations on time scales

In this article, we establish the Picard-Lindelof theorem and approximating results for dynamic equations on time scale. We present a simple proof for the existence and uniqueness of the solution. The proof is produced by using convergence and Weierstrass M-test. Furthermore, we show that the Lispchitz condition is not necessary for uniqueness. The existence of epsilon-approximate solution is established under suitable assumptions. Moreover, we study the approximate solution of the dynamic equation with delay by studying the solution of the corresponding dynamic equation with piecewise constant argument. We show that the exponential stability is preserved in such approximations.Comment: 13 page

Diet, Physical Activity, and Emotional Health: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why We Need Integrated Solutions for Total Worker Health

Background Current research advocates lifestyle factors to manage workers’ health issues, such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type II diabetes mellitus, among other things (World Health Organization (WHO) Obesity: preventing and managing the global epidemic, 2000; World Health Organization (WHO) Obesity and overweight, 2016), though little is known about employees’ lifestyle factors in high-stress, high turnover environments, such as in the long term care (LTC) sector. Methods Drawing on qualitative single-case study in Ontario, Canada, this paper investigates an under-researched area consisting of the health practices of health care workers from high-stress, high turnover environments. In particular, it identifies LTC worker’s mechanisms for maintaining physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. Results The findings suggest that while particular mechanisms were prevalent, such as through diet and exercise, they were often conducted in group settings or tied to emotional health, suggesting important social and mental health contexts to these behaviors. Furthermore, there were financial barriers that prevented workers from participating in these activities and achieving health benefits, suggesting that structurally, social determinants of health (SDoH), such as income and income distribution, are contextually important. Conclusions Accordingly, given that workplace health promotion and protection must be addressed at the individual, organizational, and structural levels, this study advocates integrated, total worker health (TWH) initiatives that consider social determinants of health approaches, recognizing the wider socio-economic impacts of workers’ health and wellbeing.York University Librarie

Depth estimation of inner wall defects by means of infrared thermography

There two common methods dealing with interpreting data from infrared thermography: qualitatively and quantitatively. On a certain condition, the first method would be sufficient, but for an accurate interpretation, one should undergo the second one. This report proposes a method to estimate the defect depth quantitatively at an inner wall of petrochemical furnace wall. Finite element method (FEM) is used to model multilayer walls and to simulate temperature distribution due to the existence of the defect. Five informative parameters are proposed for depth estimation purpose. These parameters are the maximum temperature over the defect area (Tmax-def), the average temperature at the right edge of the defect (Tavg-right), the average temperature at the left edge of the defect (Tavg-left), the average temperature at the top edge of the defect (Tavg-top), and the average temperature over the sound area (Tavg-so). Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was trained with these parameters for estimating the defect depth. Two ANN architectures, Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Radial Basis Function (RBF) network were trained for various defect depths. ANNs were used to estimate the controlled and testing data. The result shows that 100% accuracy of depth estimation was achieved for the controlled data. For the testing data, the accuracy was above 90% for the MLP network and above 80% for the RBF network. The results showed that the proposed informative parameters are useful for the estimation of defect depth and it is also clear that ANN can be used for quantitative interpretation of thermography data