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Go to Editorial ManagerIn recent decades, many factors have emerged in the building design field, as the technology development after the industrial revolution has left many environmental problems affecting building environments and turning them into unhealthy ones. Also, the issues of consuming natural resources required innovative and modern solutions to address, which needed the guidance and focus of researchers, engineers, and many other relevant disciplines to find the best treatments to solve them. One of the essential treatments was using advanced smart technology to solve the environmental problems of buildings, such as providing thermal comfort and reducing energy consumption. The concept of adaptive smart envelopes is one of this manifestation of advanced technology in the field of building design characterized by interaction and adaptation to the surrounding environment through the application of many technologies which it works to improve its environmental efficiency. The research aim was to simulate the changes in the building environment, which is treated by covering the building with an adaptive smart envelope by using the Rhinoceros Grasshopper programme.
Industrial activities significantly affect the environment by releasing many organic pollutants, including industrial dyes, phenols and antibiotics, which produce wastewater. Effective removal of these substances from wastewater has appeared as a noticeable research field owing to its environmental significance. Exorbitant operational expenses and the potential generation of supplementary pollutants load conventional techniques like adsorption, membrane separation, and coagulation. Semiconductor-based photocatalysis has effectively degraded organic contaminants into less toxic or biodegradable compounds. The construction of robust visible-light-sensitive photocatalytic hybrids for environmental decontamination is an inspiring task for researchers. The exceptional photocatalytic performance of silver halides (AgX, where X is I, Cl, and Br) has recently attracted significant consideration as photocatalysts. Moreover, the combination of silver halides with other photo-active semiconductors to create efficient visible-light-driven photocatalyst heterojunctions has significantly promoted the broader application of the photocatalysis process with enhanced efficiency. Ag-silver halides/semiconductors heterojunctions have developed as crucial components in efficient composites for photocatalysis through surface plasmonic actions, helping with visible light absorption. The current study overviews the most recent Ag and silver halide-based composite photocatalysts. Additionally, it provides an essential understanding of their promoted photocatalytic performances and their main applications in organic pollutant degradation. Moreover, the photocatalytic mechanisms and environmental applications of AgI and composites were discussed.
Contemporary urban discourse is paying increasing attention to the issue of urban resilience, due to the stresses, disasters and disturbances (natural and human) that the cities of the world are experiencing and facing, which confirms the need to be familiar with the concept of urban resilience, its dimensions, practices, and characteristics at different levels; In order to reach the aspects of developing the urban energy sector in them, and in a way that supports the preparedness of cities to face potential expected and unexpected disturbances in the future, as cities are usually formed from many main and sub-systems that are dynamically intertwined with each other, such as: the social and economic system, infrastructure systems, land use, and media Various transports, which have a high level of direct interactions with the natural environment; ; It is therefore necessary to understand how the city deals with the odds of threats and challenges in an integrated manner; To overcome its weaknesses and enhance its resilience of use, which aims to make cities more secure, resilient and sustainable in the future, as well as that requires rethinking the field of expanding the use of renewable energies and the general urban landscape. To become a search problem “Failure to exploit the potential of natural energies on the possibility of exploiting renewable natural energies with their components (active and passive) in the production of resilience urban formations in cities.” The aim of the research is to try to "extract an integrated theoretical framework on the characteristics of urban energy resilience from international and Arab experiences, and to diagnose its most important planning and design pillars and indicators, which can be adopted to evaluate the reality of urban energy resilience in local cities." The research hypothesized that “the exploitation of energy systems produced from renewable natural resources, for the purposes of environmental treatments for resilient cities, especially in the buildings of housing projects and their urban surroundings, reduces the consumption of fossil energies for the city, frees its sites from linking to depleted energy transmission networks, and reduces potential environmental pollution problems, which contributes to in the production of flexible energy systems and helps in the generation of flexible cities." The descriptive analysis method was adopted.
Concrete is considered the most important and widely used building material in the world of construction and building due to its durability, high efficiency in shaping, and relatively reasonable cost. The main component of concrete is cement, and one of the most important problems related to cement is the environmental problems associated with cement manufacturing, as the cement manufacturing process releases a large amount of carbon dioxide. Despite the essential role of concrete in construction, we cannot ignore its environmental impact. Some claim that exploring alternative materials or innovative building techniques would reduce the carbon footprint and enhance sustainability in the industry. Partial cement replacement with pozzolanic materials like zeolite is a key technique to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Zeolite, which reduces permeability, is a typical concrete ingredient that strengthens and lasts. Recently, natural zeolite has become a prominent concrete pozzolanic component. For environmental preservation and sustainable development, various experiments were done on concrete with pozzolanic components partially substituting cement and compared to ordinary concrete. A partial replacement of cement with zeolite improves the properties of concrete up to a certain age and mixing ratio. More than 44 relevant articles from 2004–2024 were selected from 762 papers evaluated for this paper. This paper reviews natural zeolite research in real applications. Additionally, it provided a cutting-edge review of natural zeolite literature through a critical analysis of various previous investigations. It also helped to understand how zeolite influences concrete mixture workability, strength, and durability. Since zeolite is a major concrete ingredient, it should be promoted as a sustainable resource.
Chemical additives and polymeric materials, selected for their compatibility and ability to improve asphalt's performance in demanding environments. Key additives, including Polyphosphoric Acid (PPA), Polyvinyl Acetate (PVAC) beads, Maleic Anhydride (MA), and Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA) resin, were mixed in precise ratios with the asphalt binder. These additives were chosen to evaluate their effects on crucial performance indicators, such as the Penetration Index (PI) and activation energy, which measure the material’s thermal stability, flexibility, and resistance to deformation. Results demonstrated that the addition of these materials significantly increased the asphalt’s activation energy by up to 45.44%, enhancing its resistance to temperature fluctuations and providing better stability under various environmental stresses. The Penetration Index (PI) also improved notably, indicating that modified asphalt exhibits greater durability and reduced susceptibility to cracking or deformation under thermal changes. These enhancements contribute to lower road maintenance requirements and support greater energy efficiency in asphalt production and application processes. Compared to neat asphalt, the modified asphalt exhibited superior thermal stability, mechanical resilience, and overall performance, making it suitable for use in diverse climatic conditions. This study provides valuable insights into sustainable asphalt modification techniques, emphasizing the role of polymer and chemical additives in extending pavement lifespan and reducing environmental impact through improved material properties.
Most of the soils suffered from significant geotechnical problems dependent on factors like the type of soil, soil composition and mineralogy. Specifically, the problems related to mechanical and physical properties of soils. Several studies have been used to mitigate the adverse effects of soils through using either additive conventional materials such as cement, lime or these soils blending with produced material and chemical materials. This paper focuses on stabilizing or improving different soils using sustainable materials. These materials provided environmental and economic benefits while mitigating a health hazard, storage problems, and a potential pollution source. They can be classified according to these sources into four groups: industrial waste (by-products), agriculture waste, domestic waste and mineral waste. According to the results of this review, compaction characteristics, California bearing ratio and unconfined compressive strength have been studied and discussed in this paper.
Flexible and rigid pavements are commonly built for airport pavements to support the moving loads of aircraft during the pavement design life. Airport pavements represent a cornerstone of the aviation world. Their condition profoundly impacts safety, operational efficiency, airport capacity, and financial well-being. These meticulously engineered surfaces must withstand the immense stresses generated by aircraft during takeoff, landing, and taxiing. At the planning stage, the pavement structure, materials, aircraft loads, environmental conditions, and pavement damage models should be evaluated. Comparing with road pavement design, airport pavement structural design is unique in terms of the traffic loads supported by pavements with high load magnitude, significant tire pressure, and dynamic traffic conditions. Over time, deterioration stemming from environmental exposure, aircraft loading, and other factors becomes inevitable. This study aims to explore the various factors influencing airport pavement performance, review the existing methodologies for pavement design and maintenance, and propose enhancements to current practices to ensure long-term durability and safety of airport pavements. This study aims to explore the various factors influencing airport pavement performance, review the existing methodologies for pavement design and maintenance, and propose enhancements to current practices to ensure long-term durability and safety of airport pavements.
The separation of water from crude oil emulsions is a critical and complex challenge in petroleum production and processing. Water-in-oil (W/O) emulsions increase viscosity, pose corrosion risks, reduce refining efficiency, and raise significant environmental concerns. Traditional separation methods often struggle with stable emulsions containing small droplets due to limitations in cost, environmental impact, and effectiveness. Electro-coalescence demulsification has emerged as a promising technique that applies electric fields to enhance droplet coalescence, facilitating efficient water removal. This comprehensive review examines the influence of electrode geometry on electro-coalescence systems in depth, synthesizes key findings from numerous studies, and provides a detailed analysis of electrode spacing calculations, critical conditions for effective demulsification, and optimal operational parameters. By exploring these aspects comprehensively, the review offers insights into how electrode design affects demulsification efficiency, guiding future advancements in crude oil processing and contributing to more sustainable practices in the petroleum industry.
Reflective cracking is a serious issue that Adversely influences the performance and longevity of asphalt overlays over deteriorated pavements. This review Looks for the Technologies which used to reduce the reflection cracks propagation by insert a new Strategies and different design materials. This research dealt with many treatments such as: increasing the layer thickness of Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA), creating modified asphalt by adding polymers to asphalt, rubberizing asphalt, carbon black, sulfur and other different materials. Geosynthetic materials were studied and analyzed to evaluate their ability to increase the layer tensile strength and minimize the effect of reflection cracks such as geotextiles, geogrids, and Stress Absorbing Membrane Interlayers (SAMI). The research shows that the increasing of overlay asphalt layer thickness leads to durability development. On the other hand, using developed materials like Polymer-Modified Asphalt and Stress Absorbing Membrane Interlayers (SAMI) Strategies leads to increasing the service life of the repaired pavement. The conclusion indicated that the development of overlay asphalt layer thickness and layer reinforcement and applying advanced environmental systems can be improving the pavement performance. These Strategies can produce a perfect solution to prevent or reduce the reflection cracks in rigid and flexible pavement.
Recently, considering polymer composite in manufacturing of mechanical parts can be caused a fatigue failure due to the very long time of exposure to cyclic loading and may at environmental temperatures higher than their glass transition temperature; therefore, in this paper, a comprehensive investigation for bending fatigue behavior at room and elevated temperatures equal to 60 °C, 70°C, and 80 °C will be done. Rotating bending test machine was manufactured for this purpose supplied with a connected furnace to perform fatigue tests at elevated temperatures. The obtained results appeared that the increase in applied stress and temperature caused a clear reduction in fatigue life; also the addition of carbon nanotubes enhanced the fatigue life at different temperatures by 183%, 205%, 218%, and 240%, respectively while the addition of short carbon fibers improved fatigue life by 324%, 351%, 387%, and 415%, respectively. As well as, Polyamide 6,6/carbon fiber composite appeared fatigue limit at temperatures equal to 20°C and 60°C and stresses approximately equal to 55 MPa and 38 MPa respectively.
Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) techniques are essential for maximizing energy extraction from photovoltaic (PV) systems under diverse environmental conditions. This paper reviews three widely used MPPT methods Perturb and Observe (P&O), Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC), and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) highlighting their effectiveness in addressing challenges such as temperature fluctuations, varying irradiance, and shading. The P&O method is noted for its simplicity and low computational requirements, but it suffers from oscillations around the maximum power point under rapidly changing conditions. FLC offers enhanced adaptability and robustness by mimicking human decision-making, performing well in dynamic environments with moderate complexity. ANN-based methods demonstrate superior tracking efficiency and fast convergence, particularly under complex and highly variable conditions, due to their ability to learn and generalize from data. These findings underscore the importance of continued development of MPPT techniques, especially intelligent and hybrid approaches, to meet the growing demand for sustainable energy. Thus, solar energy remains a highly viable solution for modern energy needs.
Providing a clean and high quality drinking water to both rural as well as urban areas is a great challenge by itself, adding to it the large volume requirements of such water at high population areas means a very high cost for such industry because mainly of the cost of expensive commercially available adsorbent used in this process. This led inhabitants of the remote and/or rural areas to use less quality water with all its risks and health challenges. In this study, a locally collected rice husk is tested to be used as an alternative adsorbent to the expensive common commercial ones. Parameters like adsorbent dosage, initial concentration of turbidity, and pH level were tested to investigate their effects on the process. Treatment of synthetic turbid water was done after changing these parameters to measure the effect of each parameter alone and the results showed a set of parameters that can be used to achieve high efficiency of turbidity removal. The study concluded that rice husk can be used as a well cheap alternative adsorbent to reduce the river water turbidity due to its availability and low cost with a decent removal efficiency approaching 95%.
Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) are generally divided into two categories: solid-core photonic crystal fibers and hollow-core photonic crystal fibers. In this paper, a long-period fiber Bragg grating (LPFBG) was experimentally fabricated in a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) using a CO₂ laser and based on the point-by-point technique. Proper LPFBGs were inscribed using laser powers of 0.9 W and 1.4 W, with grating parameters (grating period, length of each pitch, and depth of each pitch) equal to (136 µm, 48.042 µm, 16 µm) and (142 µm, 74.027 µm, 22.09 µm), respectively, for two samples. The Bragg wavelengths and full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) were (1529.274 nm, 1.34 nm) and (1529.629 nm, 5.11 nm), respectively, for the two samples fabricated using CO₂ laser powers of 0.9 W and 1.4 W. From these results, it was recognized that the optimal LPFBG-HC-PCF was the one fabricated using 0.9 W laser power. The unique structure of hollow-core photonic crystal fibers, which enables light propagation within the air core and provides a large internal surface area, has attracted significant research interest for various sensing و communication applications, Environmental and Biological Monitoring, and medical applications.
Soil reinforcement techniques have been successfully used to improve the shear properties of weak soils in recent years. To improve the utilization of waste resources and promote sustainable development of infrastructure amid rapid urbanization, one potential option for reinforcement materials is human hair fibers (HHF). Because it is a natural fiber, there are risks to human and environmental health associated with the improper disposal of human hair fiber, an occurring waste product that does not decompose completely. This fabric is abundant, has a high reusability rate, and is ideal for use as a reinforcement to address waste management issues and make the most of inefficient or unnecessary manufacturing websites for long-term sustainability. The CBR test was executed on several samples with diverse fiber possibilities to evaluate the engineering properties of the randomly placed HHF in clayey soil samples using fibers whose average length was 50 mm and whose diameter ranged from 60 to 80 microns and compared the outcomes to those of unreinforced soil. The soil sample was treated with different percentages of Human Hair fiber (0%, 0.75%, 1.5%, 1.75% and 2.25%). The results showed that the value of CBR of the soil sample decrease at 0.75% of HHF and then increased up to 2.25% of HHF.
Over the last several years, additive manufacturing (AM), sometimes known as "3D printing", has seen remarkable expansion due to mechatronics and materials science advancements. Fused filament deposition (FDM) production is the predominant technology in additive manufacturing (AM) because of its cost-effectiveness in operational and material expenses. Nevertheless, the materials often used for this technique are pristine thermoplastics. Unsuccessful printing and throwaway prototypes generate a significant quantity of trash. Utilizing green and sustainable products is crucial to minimize the environmental effects. Recycled, bio-based, and mixed recycled materials provide a promising solution for 3D printing. The absence of comprehension about the interlayer adhesion process and material degradation in FDM printing has presented a significant obstacle for these environmentally friendly materials. This study comprehensively examines many materials used for FDM three-dimensional printing filaments, including recycled, bio-based, and mixed materials. The merits and drawbacks of thermoplastics and their composites were deliberated over. This evaluation is a comprehensive guide for engineers and researchers in selecting appropriate materials for three-dimensional printing. Three-dimensional printed objects have worse mechanical characteristics in comparison to injection molded materials.
Whispering Gallery Mode Micro-Resonators (WGMRs) have received significant interest due to their great sensitivity to environmental changes, compact size, and ability to operate over a wide spectral range because their low optical losses produce high-quality factors so that they can be used in various sensing applications. This work investigates the design and implementation of cylindrical WGMRs for Refractive Index (RI) sensing for different delivery fiber diameters. Single Mode Fiber with different waist diameters (80,67.1,18) µm were used as delivery fibers. At the same time, the sensor (resonator) fiber is SMF with a diameter (125 µm). Quality factors and Free Spectral Range (FSR) were calculated and analyzed for each diameter. The quality factor for all diameters was in power of 104, which is considered good. The FSR is inversely proportional to fiber diameter. FSR values were (0.678,1.75,2.03) nm for (80,67.1,18) µm delivery fiber diameters respectively. An analyte prepared by NaCl with different refractive indices is used to investigate the RI sensor performance. Higher sensitivity is obtained from the WGMR with a smaller waist diameter, which is (-)74 nm/RIU. While for the delivery fiber diameters (80,67.1) µm were (-0.28, -9.27) nm/RIU respectively. The submitted sensor will have a good contribution in the field of chemical, biological and medical applications.
Three decades of empirical research have proven that well-being in humans is stimulated by designs that link people to natural elements and landscapes. Environmental psychology research also revealed that these characteristics can lower stress and anxiety while having a positive impact on human productivity. therefore, there were more recent interest from theorists and architects to discover approaches to re-connect the constructed environment with the natural components. One of the most current theories of re-communication and its use in architecture is called "biophilia.". Therefore, the research problem is the lack of knowledge of biophilic architecture and what are the most prominent features affecting the user. the research aims to shed light on the basics of this design theory as well as testing its design patters in the educational environment to find out which attributes are most effective for users in improving productivity and well-being By adopting the quantitative descriptive approach and based on a questionnaire for the purpose of adopting it in design and to aid in the practical application of the Biophilia idea by designers and architects. The research concluded that there are design features that are more important than others for educational buildings, such as (day light, water, air, plants, landscapes, mobility, integrating the parts to create the whole).
This study simulates a free-space optical communication system that uses optical beams with varying responses to atmospheric disturbances to secure transmitted data. Atmospheric turbulence was modeled with high accuracy to replicate real-world conditions closely. Non-diffracting beams were generated and used to represent optical beams and compared in two scenarios, conventional data transmission, and optifusion data protection. This approach facilitated a comprehensive analysis of the transmission environment and the effectiveness of optifusion, identifying the most suitable non-diffracting beam types for secure data propagation. By analyzing the values of key performance metrics of the selected non-diffracting beams across different weather conditions and long propagation distances, the study demonstrated the simulation system's reliability and the optifusion method's effectiveness in enhancing data security. The results showed that non-diffracting beams resist atmospheric turbulences strongly, emphasizing their potential for secure, long-range free-space optical communications.
Reclaimed (recycled) asphalt pavement (RAP), the most recycled material worldwide, is the mostly reclaimed material utilized in hot mix asphalt. Polymer (Crumb rubber) incorporation frequently leads to enhanced durability and resistance to heat cracking and rutting, two forms of permanent deformation. It also relieves stiffness and minimizes fatigue damage. This study aims to gather all previous RAP-related research and crumb rubber CR, so that the impact of using these materials on mechanical, physical properties of asphalt pavement, environmental effect and cost effective are clarify and explained. The finding of this research proved that the use of RAP and CR provide considerable structural and financial enhancements to the construction.