Development of Flood Defense Alternaives for the Beach of Deir El Balah Camp, Palestine

The development along the coastal zone has led to the host of problems such as erosion, siltation, flooding, loss of coastal resources and the destruction of the fragile marine habitats. The erosion threatens the coastal zone, which affects people's economic, tourist, and recreational life. The main reason of the erosion is due to Khan Younis breakwater and the sea waves working on empty the beachy sand, thereby flooding and scouring the area as it ebbs and removing part of the unconsolidated sand. This study uses Geographic Information System to detect changes in the coastline along Deir El Balah coast during the 1972–2020 period. Shoreline change rates in the form of erosion and accretion patterns are quantified. In addition, four alternatives are proposed to to mitigate the current problems raised by repeated flooding and erosion through reefballs, cubes, geotubes and seawalls and analyze their impacts on coastal protection to provide the best possible mitigations in environmental, economical and engineering terms. Multi criteria analysis is used to assess the alternatives with respect to criteria that capture the key dimensions of the selection process. Multi criteria have been selected and addressed the most important factors when planning, designing, financing, and implementing coastal protection measures. Based on the analysis, the best alternative of three-row reefballs submerged breakwaters is recommended.

Analysis of Injury Potential of Three-year-old Child Occupants Caused by Inappropriate Installation of Enhanced Child Restraint System with Top Tether in Frontal Crash Accidents

Objective: Frontal crash accidents remain a significant factor in causing the preventable injury and fatality for child occupants aged 3 in China. Despite the increased public awareness and utilization of child restraint system (CRS), inappropriate installations still exist and lead to a potential to result in injuries of head, thorax and abdomen regions of child occupants, especially when it comes to enhanced child restraint system (ECRS) with top tether. The current study focuses on the influence of top tether upon safety performance of ECRS with top tether in dynamic tests with different set-ups and explores the relationship between inappropriate installation of ECRS with top tether and the injury potential of child occupants aged 3 in a frontal crash. Methods: A testing scheme including 4 dynamic tests was devised to ascertain the extent to which the top tether affected the accelerations of thorax, the abdominal penetration and the head displacements. Different kinds of acceleration curves were employed to conduct the tests and to simulate the real status and situation of child occupants aged 3 in the CRS installed with top tether and without top tether respectively. Parameters of accelerations, abdominal penetrations, and head displacements were measured to analyze quantitatively the influence of inappropriate installations of ECRS with top tether under different conditions. Results: The safety performance of ECRS with the use of top tether was found better than that of ECRS without the use of top tether either in the normal condition or in the extreme condition. The test using the acceleration curves defined by regulations, the accelerations of thorax, abdominal penetrations, and head displacements of P3 manikin in the ECRS with the top tether connected to the anchor point revealed results that all met the requirements. While in the test using acceleration curves of the same kind, and when the top tether was not connected, the parameters measured displayed that the safety performance of the sample was worse than the former one. As for the tests using the more severe acceleration curves defined at will, it was more obvious that top tether could affect the function and safety performance of ECRS greatly, and the functional failure and severe damages occurred to the ECRS without the use of top tether. ECRS with the use of top tether was partly qualified even under the more severe conditions. Conclusions: Inappropriate installation of ECRS such as omitting the step of connecting top tether to anchor point could cause severe injuries and fatalities in frontal crash accidents. Effective measures should be taken to minimize the chances of inappropriate installations of ECRS.

Parsing Arabic Verbal Sentence Using Grammar Ontology

We build a model to parse the Arabic verbal sentence based on Arabic grammar ontology. The ontology conceptualizes the Arabic verbal sentence through the representation of grammar parsing classes, verb properties, and conjunction checking. By populating the ontology with verbal sentences and adding grammar rules, we form a verbal sentence knowledge base. The parsing model is supported by morphological analysis for sentence syntactic analysis and supported by Arabic synonyms extractor for deriving synonyms. We have implemented the model and have provided it with a user interface where the user can enter a sentence to be parsed and obtains the parsing results. The interface has the options to partially or totally add diacritics to the words of the sentence and it has the possibility to remove ambiguity by choosing the most appropriate analysis from lexicon results. To evaluate the model, we have selected a representative set of Arabic verbal sentences from Arabic grammar books that represent all the possibilities of a verbal sentence. We have performed several parsing tests on these sentences with and without diacritics. The results prove the ability of the model to parse the various forms of the verbal sentence. The accuracy increases when the sentence is diacriticized while avoiding free word order and following the Arabic verbal sentence general form.

Text File Privacy on the Cloud Based on Diagonal Fragmentation and Encryption

Despite the growing reliance on cloud services and software, privacy is somewhat difficult. We store our data on remote servers in cloud environments that are untrusted. If we do not handle the stored data well, data privacy can be violated with no awareness on our part. Although it requires expensive computation, encrypting the data before sending it appears to be a solution to this problem. So far, all known solutions to protect textual files using encryption algorithms fell short of privacy expectations. Thus is because encrypting cannot stand by itself. The encrypted data on the cloud server becomes full file in the hand causing the privacy of this data to be intrusion-prone, thus allowing intruders to access the file data once they can decrypt it. This study aimed to develop an effective cloud confidentiality model based on combining fragmentation and encryption of text files to compensate for reported deficiency in encryption methods. The fragmentation method used the strategy of dividing text files into two triangles through the axis. Whereas the encryption method used the Blowfish algorithm. The research concluded that high confidentiality is achieved by building a multi-layer model: encryption, chunk, and fragmentation of every chunk to prevent intruders from reaching the data even if they were able to decrypt the file. Using the privacy accuracy equation (developed for the purpose in this research), the model achieved accuracy levels of 96% and 90% when using 100 and 200 words in each chunk on small, medium, and large files respectively.

A Stress-State based Peridynamics model for elastio-plastic material modeling

A Stress-State based PD (SSPD) model using a well-known yield criteria is proposed in this paper and tested on the modeling of two dimensional bars under different loading levels as a first step for further development. SSPD is based upon peridynamics (PD) which utilize temporal spatial integro-differential equation of motion and formulates continuum problems in terms of integral equations, which are capable of modeling discontinuities such as cracks. The proposed bond strength not only depends on the bond stretch, but on the current state of all bonds connected to a particle as well. Thus, a stress-based peridynamics model is obtained. The tensile simulation compared to conventional FEM shows promising performance with an error of 5%. Compression simulations, however, need more investigation to include the effect of contact forces.

Enhancing the Documentation Process of Traffic Accidents Registry in Gaza City Using GIS

aza City is the largest city in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian territories. The city has a population about 700,000 inhabitants with an average population density of 12600 person/km2. Documentation procedure of traffic accidents in the city is traditional and inefficient. It is not only based on paper formatting but also is not performed in the correct way since it misses the determination of exact position of occurrence of these accidents. Furthermore, documentation data do not involve appropriate level of details and need to be re-organized. This study aims to enhance the documentation process of the traffic accidents in Gaza City using GIS as well as developing appropriate recommendations that can raise the level of traffic safety in it. To enhance the documentation, a new mobile and desktop applications based on GIS Cloud are developed in order to automatically store spatial and descriptive data about traffic accidents in a computerized geodatabase. Many analysis using GIS of the accidents statistics of 2019 are performed. Results indicate that the hot neighborhood in the city is Northern Remal, the hot road is Salah Al-Din Str., the hot period is 12 – 14 O'clock, most accidents are caused by cars, and medium injuries are the dominant of these accidents. The study recommends to build a digital geodatabase that involves all necessary data associated with traffic accidents because it is the basis for planning, analyzing and making decisions. It is also recommended to establish a GIS department in Ministry of Transportation. There is a strong need to legislate binding laws to prevent the increase in the number of traffic accidents in addition to make field actions such as the necessity to set up traffic lights as much as possible near health centers, schools and other public places.

Investigation of Power Quality Indices in Jordan University of Science and Technology Grid-Tie Photovoltaic Plant

In this paper, the effects of the grid-tie photovoltaic plant (PV) are analyzed on the power factor and the voltage harmonic distortion in the power quality aspect of the distribution network. The conditions for the total harmonic distortion (THD) in the power grid related to the photovoltaic power station connected to the user side are also summarized. Based on MATLAB/SIMSCAPE software, one string of the photovoltaic system at the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) was simulated and hence, compared its results with the real results of the system. Measurement and simulation results illustrate that the voltage harmonic distortions to the power grid do not exceed the recommended levels, but the photovoltaic system needs to have a capacitor bank to get a unity power factor.

Integrated Land Use and Transportation Modeling within Data-Poor Contexts

Integrated Land Use and Transportation Models (ILUTMs) are revolutionary planning support tools that have been used in the developed countries since the early 1990s. ILUTMs evolved in response to the complexity of the urban planning pro-cess, which became more communicative and collaborative process involving different stakeholders with diverse and con-flicting interests. The main challenge for the ILUTMs to be used in the developing countries is the cost of rich data needed for these models to give satisfactory results. This paper discusses the technical problems facing the researchers and the ur-ban planners in adopting ILUTMs. The research proposes an alternative modeling approach that makes ILUTMs applicable in the developing countries’ context. The suggested approach is centered on the idea of functioning within data-poor con-text instead of the costly data-rich context. The paper concludes with the expected limitations in the new modeling ap-proach and suggests some guidelines for the researchers in order overcome these limitations.

Blockchain-Based Quality of Service for Healthcare System in the Gaza Strip

Electronic Health Records EHRs are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among different parties for example patients, physicians and administration. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent health records of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability, and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EHR data management and sharing system using blockchain. This study aims to develop the use of health records as well as finding the current status of EHRs by designing a checklist to measure the extent of use of health records in the Gaza Strip hospitals and exploring the possibilities of using blockchain technology to develop the use of the electronic health records to share accurate and complete health data between multiple parties such as patients, doctors, and managers in an effective, transparent and secure manner.

Effect of Pressure on the Performance of Passive Two-Phase Closed Thermosyphon System Using R-134a

Two-phase closed thermosiphon system for cooling high heat flux electronic devices was constructed and tested on a lab scale. The performance of the thermosyphon system was investigated using R-134a as a working fluid. The effect of heat flux and the refrigerant pressure on the evaporator side heat transfer coefficient were investigated. It was found that the heat transfer coefficient increases by increasing the heat flux on the evaporator or by reducing the inside pressure. The effect of heat transfer mode of the condenser (natural or forced) also affected the overall heat transfer coefficient in the cycle. At the 200W heating load, the values of the heat transfer coefficients were 32 and 1.5 kW/m². ˚C, for natural and forced convection modes, respectively. The temperature difference between the evaporator and the refrigerant saturation pressure was found to be dependent on heat flux and the pressure inside the system. At 40 W heating load, the heat transfer coefficient was calculated to be 500, 3000 and 7300 W/oC.m2 at 0.152, .135 and 0.117 reduced pressure, respectively. It can be concluded that such a thermosyphon system can be used to cool high heat flux devices. This can be done using an environmentally friendly refrigerant and without any need for power to force the convection at the condenser.