Through this paper we aim to measure a distance using an optical signal. The distance measurement is based on the time of the flight (TOF) method via correlation technique. A method of stretching the time scale is used to decrease the operating frequency. A proof of concept using Matlab results in a distance resolution less than 17mm. The algorithm is implemented on a standalone cheap digital signal controller and the measured results show high accuracy comparable to the simulated one. The optical transmitters and optical receivers are implemented using off shelf components.

Five reinforced concrete beams with rectangular cross section 120 x 300 mm and flexural reinforcement ratio of 0.0124 were cast and tested under three-point static loading. One beam was tested up to failure as control beam. The rest of the beams were loaded up to the inclined cracking load. Then the load was removed and the beams were repaired using steel fiber-reinforced self-consolidating concrete (SFRSCC) jacket with varied thicknesses and fiber contents. Then the repaired were retested up to failure. The fiber contents of 0.5, 0.75 and 0.75% by the volume of concrete as well as jacket thicknesses of 30 and 50 mm were considered for this study. The experimental results showed that the proposed technique enhanced the load capacity of the repaired beams by up to 121% with respect to the original specimen, and reduced the induced deflections and strains at the different stages of loading. Moreover, increasing fiber content with a fixed jacket thickness was found to be more effective than increasing the jacket thickness with the same fiber content.

This paper presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA)- based method to determine the location and size of DG sources in distribution systems using single DG placement algorithm for determining the locations at first. Then, the GA is utilized to determine the global sizes of DG sources which minimize single- or multi-objective function related to these systems. The influence of active- and reactive-power injection on the sizing and placement of DG sources is investigated. The predictions of the proposed method as regards the sizing and placement of DG sources are compared with those obtained before using particle swarm optimization at steady weather conditions.

Owing to the huge damage caused by flash water and torrents in the desert roads, the attempts to prevent such damage has received a great attention. Culverts are the popular engineering tool usually used for converting the accumulated runoff water from one side of the desert roads to the other side. This engineering tool prevents overtopping which stops the safe traffic stream over the roads. Since the culvert entrance geometry is one of the prime factors affecting its accurate performance. The present study is a trial for increasing the discharging efficiency of such culverts to give more safety for the desert roads. Investigating the influence of using inclined headwall at the culvert entrance on discharge efficiency, its inclination angle in the same direction of the flow and in the opposite direction will be tested as well. A needed survey of references related to the current study topic, covers a suitable time period were included in a tabulated form, with the needed technical comments. The theoretical approach also was introduced. A comparative study was done for the results obtained by most popular researchers and the calculated discharging efficiency reached by each of them, and given in a tabulated form.

Abstract: Many authors and researchers examined and tested several methods and tools for improving the performance efficiency of the culverts. Owing to increase the importance of the desert roads nowadays for joining the new constructed industrial and agricultural communities all over Egypt, and because of the draught nature of that new desert areas, for which the desert road network was constructed, and the possibility of the harmful and destructive impact of the torrents and flash floods periodically occurs in such regions, our present work will be focusing on the under desert road culverts. The role of the under desert road culverts is the prime factor in the constructional, and traffic safety of such roads. Its efficiency in converting the accumulated flash water from one side of the road to the other side at a significantly very short time protects the roads against failure due to overtopping. The present work introduces a new constructional simple tool for maximizing the discharging efficiency of the under desert road culverts, and insuring its constructional safety in addition to the safety of the traffic over them. The introduced tool (as the best of our knowledge) wasn't investigated yet, or technically examined by any of the authors reviewed in the literature. 10 models of the inclined headwall with different inclination angles in the same direction of the stream flow, and in the opposite direction were tested. The optimum inclination angle which gives the maximum discharge under the minimum U.S. water head, for more safety of desert road against flash floods and torrents was introduced.

In this paper, C-means algorithm is fuzzified and regularized by incorporating both local data and membership information. The local membership information is incorporated via two membership relative entropy (MRE) functions. These MRE functions measure the information proximity of the membership function of each pixel to the membership average in the immediate spatial neighborhood. Then minimizing these MRE functions pushes the membership function of a pixel toward its average in the pixel vicinity. The resulting algorithm is called the Local Membership Relative Entropy based FCM (LMREFCM). The local data information is incorporated into the LMREFCM algorithm by adding to the standard distance a weighted distance computed from the locally smoothed data. The final resulting algorithm, called the Local Data and Membership Relative Entropy based FCM (LDMREFCM), assigns a pixel to the cluster more likely existing in its immediate neighborhoods. This provides noise immunity and results in clustered images with piecewise homogeneous regions. Simulation results of segmentation of synthetic and real-world noisy images are presented to compare the performance of the proposed LMREFCM and LDMREFCM algorithms with several FCM-related algorithms

In this paper, a fuzzy clustering technique for image segmentation is developed by incorporating a hybrid of local spatial membership and data information into the conventional hard C-means (HCM) algorithm. This incorporation is a threefold procedure. (1) The membership function of a pixel is spatially smoothed in the pixel vicinity. (2) The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the pixel membership function and the smoothed one is added to the HCM objective function for fuzzification. (3) The resulting fuzzified HCM is regularized by adding a weighted HCM-like function where the original pixel data are replaced by locally smoothed ones. Thereby the weight is proportional to the residual of the locally smoothed membership. This residual decreases when many pixels existing in the pixel vicinity belong to the same cluster. Thus, the weighted distance decreases, allowing the pixel membership to follow the dominant membership in the pixel vicinity. The simulation results of segmenting synthetic, medical and media images have shown that the proposed algorithm provides better performance compared to several previously developed algorithms. For example, in a synthetic image, with added white Gaussian noise having a variance of 0.3, the proposed algorithm provides accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 92%, 84% and 94.7% respectively, while the algorithm with the closest results provides 81.9% of accuracy, 62.2% of sensitivity and 86.8% of specificity. In addition, the proposed algorithm shows the capability to identify the number of clusters.

Automated guided vehicles have been widely used in flexible manufacturing systems especially in a job shop and flow shop. Recently, they are included in other fields such as container terminals. This paper demonstrates a literature review of the last three decades about the scheduling problems of the automated guided vehicles in three main classes, namely job shops, flow shops, and container terminals. We classify the literature according to the scheduling problems and the solution approaches. The results of the survey are that the solution methods mainly focus on using simulation as a key performance analysis tool, whereas, the big computation times of the developed mathematical models make heuristics approaches are dominant for solving such models. After that, we discuss research gaps to the purpose of finding new research directions.

Fifteen self-consolidating concrete (SCC) as well as five steel fiber-reinforced self-consolidating concrete (SFR-SCC) mixes using full-length crimped steel fibers were developed and tested in order to optimize a suitable(SFR-SCC) mix for repair of beams. Water-cementitious materials (w/cm) ratio, sand/coarse aggregate ratio and presence of basalt dust were the main variables taken into consideration. The test results showed that the mix design for the SCC mixes without steel fibers can be achieved by satisfying the flowability criterion.But for the design of self- consolidating concrete mixes with steel fibers , both theflowability and passing ability criteria must be satisfied. Basalt dust was found to be necessary for SCC mixes without fibers with sand/coarse aggregate ratios of 0.9 and 0.8, and also for developing SCC mixes with crimped steel fibers. SFR-SCC mix with sand/coarse aggregate of 1.1 had satisfactory results in both fresh and hardened properties. SFR-SCC mixes with sand/coarse aggregate of 0.9 and 0.8 did not satisfy fresh properties criteria even with dust/coarse aggregate ratio of 0.4. The suggested SFR-SCC mix was used to repair a beam cracked due to shear stresses. For this purpose, two RC beams were cast and tested under three-point loading. One beam was tested as control beam and the other beam was repaired using the suggested mix. The inclined cracking and ultimate load of the repaired beam were increased by87.5% and 91% comparing to the control beam, respectively.The flexural stiffness was increased significantly for the repaired beam comparing tothe control beam. The test results also showed the great contribution of SFR-SCCin both compression and tension zones.

مقدمة يشهد العالم في الوقت الحاضر اهتماما متزايدا بقضايا البيئة والتنمية المستدامة، حيث ظهر أن نموذج التنمية الحالي أصبح مرتبطا بأسلوب الحياة الاستهلاكي وعدم الترشيد، والذي أدى بدوره إلي أزمات بيئية متفاقمة. ولتحقيق التكامل في استدامة مجتمعات المدن العربية المعاصرة ينبغي تطبيق مفاهيم الاستدامة على مستوى المبنى والبيئة العمرانية. فقد كان الترشيد في الاستخدام فطرة حياتية وسلوك تلقائي ذو مرجعية في المجتمعات العربية ومدن عمارة المسلمين. وقد حث ديننا الإسلامي علي عدم الإسراف والحفاظ على البيئة، وتجانس العمران مع المستعمل في بوتقة متناغمة، والتكامل بين الجانب البيئي والسيكولوجي والسلوكي للإنسان بالإضافة إلى الجانب الروحي والمادي، وهو ما تعاني منه مدننا العربية المعاصرة. ويمثل المسجد احد أهم المنشآت الدينية التي توجب ضرورة تحقيق مفهوم الترشيد بها ومن ثم تحقيق مفهوم الإستدامة. فرضية البحث: إن المسجد هو المكان الذي يتعلم فيه المسلم كل أمور حياته، وإذا كانت عمارة المسجد تراعى مفاهيم الترشيد في الاستهلاك في مرحلة التصميم فإن ذلك سينعكس على كافة أنشطة الإنسان المسلم وبالتالي على المجتمع بالكامل وعلى كافة الأبنية الأخرى. هدف البحث: تأصيل دور وأهمية المساجد في تطبيق مفهوم الترشيد في الاستهلاك بالمدن العربية المعاصرة. منهجية البحث: تحليل واستنباط طرق تطبيق مفاهيم الترشيد في الاستهلاك في عمارة المساجد العربية المعاصرة.