Scopus Research — Lina Hussein Ali

Expansive soils experience volumetric expansion as they absorb water, resulting in pressure being exerted on the foundation soils and causing movement of the foundation. The forces generated by these variations in volume may cause substantial damage to the buildings above them. Date seeds are the leftover material from certain facilities that make date syrup. Laboratory experiments were conducted to examine the effects of DSA work as a soil stabilizer on the expansive soil's compressibility and expansion. Four different amounts of DSA (6%, 9%, 12 and 15%) were added to the bentonite soil to investigate the effect of DSA on bentonite soil properties. Compaction, Atterberg limits, and unconfined compression tests are selected to investigate the mechanical and swelling improvement in bentonite soil. According to test findings, adding DSA reduced bentonite soil's plasticity and expansive index with increasing DSA ratios. The unconfined compressive strength test was conducted during three curing ages (0, 7 and 28) curing ages day, and the best results were obtained when using 9% of DSA as stabilizer materials. © Author(s) 2024.

Municipal solid waste (MSW) management worldwide represents environmental and economic challenges being a source of recycling and recovering of various materials that conserve and rescue different environmental resources and at the same time most of these wastes can be utilized as energy source. This study was designed to assess the process of collecting and disposing of municipal solid wastes generated in various city and countryside districts within Babylon province-Iraq. A total of 20 residential districts were selected, consisting of 15 and 5 districts in Al-Hilla city and countryside, respectively and daily generated MSW per capita/day covering food residues, plastic, paper, can and glass wastes were considered. It was found that the mean capita/day of Al-Hilla city districts was significantly higher than that of countryside ones which were 0.644 ± 0.16 and 0.416 ± 0.12 kg/capita/day, respectively. Also, all generated municipal solid waste components of towns have been recorded as being similarly greater than of the countryside giving a higher percentage of food residues, plastic, paper, can and glass wastes than those of countryside. In both districts, food residues formed the highest percentage of solid waste components followed by plastic and wastes while the lowest percentage was metal can waste and paper waste for town areas. In the countryside areas, the lowest solid wastes component was paper waste followed by aluminum can wastes. Theoretical calculation of these values has shown that expected means of both daily and annually MSW generated in Babylon province were 1,243,089 and 453,727,485 tons, respectively. ©2025 The authors.

Soils have a detrimental impact on engineered structures, such as pavements and foundations, are often referred to as problematic or challenging soils. These soils encompass various types, including but not limited to the expansive soil, the damage arises from inadequate or unfavorable engineering characteristics, including low shear strength, excessive compressibility, and substantial volume alterations. Expansive soils, in particular, pose a considerable challenge due to their susceptibility to the shrink-swell phenomenon when interacting with water. Addressing these challenges requires implementing various soil treatment or stabilization techniques, including mechanical and chemical techniques. The decontamination techniques that incorporate sustainability principles receive preference for their use of environmentally friendly materials and their attempts to reduce the consumption of natural resources. Pozzolanic materials have been meticulously selected in this comprehensive analysis for discussion and thorough consideration as effective chemical stabilizers. The chosen pozzolanic materials encompass a range of options, including agricultural waste, conceptual waste, industrial, and byproducts. These options may include ashes derived from agricultural waste and various types of calcined clay. A wide array of materials in civil engineering contributes to the construction process. These materials comprise egg ash, sugarcane straw ash, rice husk ash, silica fume, fly ash, blast furnace slag, cement, and lime. In a broader context, using pozzolanic materials to stabilize expansive soils is crucial in mitigating swelling and Atterberg's limits while enhancing compaction and strength parameters. Nevertheless, it is essential to acknowledge the wide range of percentages associated with the use of pozzolanic materials as stabilizing agents. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

This study investigates the torsional performance of reinforced concrete beams with transverse circular openings and examines methods to mitigate the detrimental effects of these openings using Ultra-High-Performance Concrete (UHPC) and diagonal reinforcement. The experimental component involved casting and evaluating eight beams with dimensions of 150 × 200 × 1200 mm under pure torsion. Among these, two beams were solid (without openings), one was made from normal-strength concrete (NSC), and the rest were cast with UHPC. The beams with openings were categorized into two groups based on the size of the openings—small and large. Each group comprised three beams: the first was cast from NSC and included diagonal reinforcement, the second from UHPC with diagonal reinforcement, and the third from UHPC but without diagonal reinforcement. Results indicated that all beams with openings cast from UHPC exhibited a substantial increase in ultimate torque compared to the control NSC solid beam. NSC beams with small openings showed a marginal decrease in ultimate load capacity by 1.47%, whereas those with large openings experienced a significant reduction of 17.65%. UHPC effectively compensated for the strength lost due to the absence of diagonal reinforcement in both small and large openings. Initial stiffness in NSC beams decreased by 19.4% and 70.1% for small and large openings, respectively. Conversely, UHPC beams demonstrated improved initial stiffness, with increases of approximately 64% for small and 34% for large openings. This study proposes ultimate torsional equations for UHPC beams with various opening sizes. These equations are validated by comparing them with results from previous experimental research, examining the performance of UHPC beams with and without openings. © 2024 by the authors.

Soft soils usually have shear strength values less than 200 kpa such as clay, silty clay, clayey sand, and soft organic clay. The presence of soft soils in engineering sites requires immediate remediation, which is either altering the site, or removing and replacing the existing soil. These solutions are not always applicable. Hence, other methods are needed which soil stabilization one of them. Soil stabilization is the modification of the physical and geotechnical properties of the weak, and soft soil either mechanically by compaction or chemically using chemical stabilizers. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the stabilization of soft soils by utilizing sustainable stabilizers which are waste and by-product materials such as ground granulated blast slag (GGBS), activated GGBS and cement kiln dust (CKD). These stabilizers are utilized as replacement to the traditional binders (cement and lime). The results indicate that GGBS alone gives only a slight enhancement because of the glassy phase of this material. Nevertheless, activation of GGBS by other materials improves the physical and geotechnical characteristics of soft soils substantially while the use of CKD gave remarkable enhancement to the soft soil characteristics. The physical properties are evaluated by Atterberg limits and compaction parameters, and the geotechnical characteristics are evaluated by the unconfined compressive strength (UCS) test. © 2024 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.

Ultrahigh-performance concrete (UHPC) is a type of concrete that has gained attention from researchers for its potential use in various structural applications to improve the behavior of concrete structures. Despite this interest, there are limited experimental test results available on how the ratio of stirrups and the dosage of steel fibers affect the torsional behavior of UHPC beams. This study presents an experimental investigation and theoretical prediction of torque capacity (UHPC) of beams with different ratios of stirrups and dosages of steel fibers under pure torsion. One normal-strength concrete (NSC) beam and 10 UHPC beams with 150×200-mm cross sections were tested. The experimental parameters were the dosages of steel fibers (1% and 2%) and the spacings of the stirrups of 0.0, 50,100, 150, and 200 mm. Including the UHPC high tensile strength and volume fraction of steel fibers, an expression for cracking and ultimate torques of UHPC was proposed and verified. Results showed that the UHPC beams have brittle failure modes compared to NSC beams. Results demonstrated that the UHPC beams showed higher initial cracking and ultimate torsional moments than the NSC beam. The additional steel fibers enhance the torsional properties, and this improvement was linearly at the effective stirrup's ratio higher than 0.25%. The 1% or higher steel fiber dosage was confirmed to be enough to substitute the missing strength of the stirrups. Results of previous research and the suggested cracking and ultimate torque equations of UHPC agreed with the experimental results. © 2024 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Geotextile reinforcement techniques have been widely used in paving works around the world and have proven to be effective in improving pavement performance. This study has focused on using different positions and numbers of geotextile reinforcement sheets between the layers of flexible pavement for rutting reduction. Fitting depth was measured in the field at seven constructed sections of the pavement of the road model. Each section has been strengthened with different reinforcement approaches. All road sections were subjected to a maximum load repetition of 10,000 cycles. The results indicate that using three layers of geotextile beneath each course of the designed road pavement sections (surface, binder, and base) reduced rutting by 96%. Traffic benefit ratio (TBR) has been employed in this study to reveal the behavior of geotextile reinforcement in increasing the service life of the road. TBR values are the load cycling ratio between the reinforced and unreinforced section for the exact recorded rut depth, it has been found to be minimally equal to 4 for the case of using one layer of reinforcement at interface I, and that value keeps growing up for other reinforcement cases. © 2022 Abdul Hadi Meteab AL Sa'adi et al., published by De Gruyter.

This study focuses on studying the impacts of residues oil on the geotechnical properties of soil and the performance of raft footing rested on oil contaminated soil and subjected to vertical loads. The contaminant used in the present study is residues oil, which is by product disposed of diesel engine oils. The soil samples are contaminated artificially by soaking with two percentage of disposed engine oil of contaminant consist of (disposed engine oil and gasoline) of 20% weight of dried of intact soil samples to obtain different concentrations of contaminant absorbed by soil samples for 30 days to complete the saturation. The mechanical model manufactured to investigate the behavior of raft footing under vertical static loading rested on intact and contaminated soils. The obtained results detected contaminant content have notable impacts on the physical soil characteristics such as the fine particles, specific gravity, plasticity index, and maximum dry unit weight decreased with the increase of contaminant content than that of intact soil. The mechanical soil properties of soil indicated the increase of the compressibility of soil with increase of residues oil percentage, but the soil strength and stiffness are decreased notably. In addition, the total and permanent settlement of raft footing constructed in contaminated soil samples increased by (27-43) % and by (41-58) % than that of an intact soil sample, respectively. © 2020 Trans Tech Publications Ltd, Switzerland.