The long-term behavior of different fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) tendons has been investigated experimentally
up to 2000 h. Seven half-scaled exterior post-tensioned (PT) beam-column connection subassemblies, containing reduced length basalt fiber reinforced polymer (BFRP), carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP), and glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) tendons, were tested. To simulate the actual loading conditions in real buildings, an equivalent gravity load was applied to each connection subassembly. Also, to investigate the PT force level effect, three PT force levels, up to 50 %, were applied to 10 mm BFRP tendons, while two PT force levels were applied to 10 mm CFRP tendons. Besides, a 20 % PT force level was applied to 10 mm GFRP tendons. In addition, to study the effect of tendons’ diameter on the long-term behavior, PT connection subassembly containing 12 mm diameter BFRP tendons with 30 % PT force level was tested. The maximum PT force losses were almost 6.1, 5.8, 4.0 % for BFRP, CFRP, and GFRP, respectively. Finally, according to the experimental test results, unified relaxation equations were proposed to predict the amount of PT force loss. Consequently, the predicted PT force losses for one-million-hour period were approximately 15.3 and 12.2 % for BFRP and CFRP tendons, respectively.

Recently, climate change has attracted significant intension globally. Accordingly, numerous initiatives are under action for reducing the consumption of fossil fuels and increasing the share of renewable energy sources. This research work proposes an eco-friendly and sustainable electrical power system that could fully or partially fulfill requirements of the local load of the system under concern. The proposed power has the merit of utilizing topography of the site under concern, Al- Jabal Al-Gharbi district, Libya, to exploit the locally available resources such as biomass and sewage plants. The availability of resources was first studied, concluding that 110.87 × 10⁶ m³⁄year are available for generating biogas and electricity. Moreover, biogas is extracted from biomass fermentation plants with a capacity of 244,845 tons/year produced from agricultural, municipality organic, livestock, and sewage residues in the …

In this paper, a photodiode (PD)/transimpedance (TIA) interface is presented. The cathode terminal of the PD is AC-coupled to one of the inputs of a pseudo-differential TIA while the anode terminal is DC-coupled to the other input of the TIA. The DC-coupled input provides a path for the low-frequency component of the input signal to reach the output. This component is extracted by a baseline wander compensation scheme (BWCS) and fed to the input to eliminate signal drift after long data runs. Compared with the conventional pseudo-differential receiver, the proposed interface improves the gain, the gain-bandwidth product (GBW), and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by 5dB, 1.37× and 4.5dB, respectively, while maintaining 209× smaller low cutoff frequency than the AC coupled receiver. The proposed interface is compatible with any TIA topology. Post-layout simulations and analytical models validate the feasibility of the proposed technique.

This article presents a low-power, high-gain, and wide–dynamic range (DR) photoplethysmography (PPG) sensory system with a novel direct current (dc) compensation loop and light-emitting diode (LED) dimming control. The proposed PPG system exhibits a signal-aware performance, where, at strong PPG signal levels, the dc compensation loop’s capability of removing dc photocurrent is increased and the LED’s driving current is reduced. This ability allows the entire DR to be utilized by the useful alternating current (ac) component of the signal and reduces power dissipation. Fabricated in 0.35- μm standard CMOS technology, the proposed PPG sensor occupies an area of 1.744 mm2 . The proposed system exhibits a high gain and a low input-referred noise current of 19.6 MΩ and 11.23 pArms , respectively, while dissipating only 9.9 μW of power at the receiver’s analog frontend. The proposed dc compensation loop can remove up to 80 μA of dc photocurrent for 2% total harmonic distortion (THD), achieving a DR of 137 dB. An external microcontroller unit (MCU) uses a machine learning (ML) algorithm to extract blood pressure (BP) from the analog output of the implemented PPG sensor chip. Measurements from eight human subjects show a mean absolute error (MAE) and a standard deviation of 2.25 ± 2.82 mmHg for systolic BP (SBP) and 5.01 ± 2.10 mmHg for diastolic BP (DBP).

The single image super-resolution (SISR) is a computer vision task needed in many real-world applications. There are many methods developed to solve ill-posed SISR problem; however, these methods are based on attention mechanisms that need a large computing processing cost. So, these attention-based models cannot be used in real-world applications that need fast models. Thus, we propose an enhanced convolution mixer (EConvMixer) module to solve this SISR problem by using lower computing convolution layers. The EConvMixer is designed based on utilizing three convolution types, namely the dilated depthwise convolution for increasing the receptive field, the depthwise convolution for mixing spatial locations, and the pointwise convolution for mixing channel locations. Based on using this EConvMixer layer, we build a lightweight extended convolution mixer network (EConvMixN) for SR images …