The Internet has provided traditional retailers a new means with which to serve customers. Consequently, many ‘‘bricks-and-mortar’’ retailers have transformed to ‘‘clicks-and-mortar’’ by incorporating Internet sales. Examples of companies making such a transition include Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, etc. Despite the increasing prevalence of this practice, several fundamental questions re...

In this article, we introduce the concept of co-covering which is the dual of covering concept. Then, we prove several theorems being similar to the theorems that have been de-veloped for the covering concept. For example, we provide the lifting criterion for co-coverings of a topological space X, which helps us to classify them by subgroups of the group of all homeomorphisms of X.

Recently, as a supplement of cement, the utilization of pozzolanic materials in cement and concrete manufacturing has increased significantly. This study investigates the scope to use pozzolanic wastes (slag, palm oil fuel ash and rice husk ash) as an alkali activated binder (AAB) that can be used as an alternative to cement. To activate these materials, sodium hydroxide solution was used at 1....

This paper presents a new isogeometric mortar contact formulation based on an extended finite element interpolation to capture physical pressure discontinuities at the contact boundary. The so called two-half-pass algorithm is employed, which leads to an unbiased formulation and, when applied to the mortar setting, has the additional advantage that the mortar coupling term is no longer present ...

In this study, the researchers investigated the potential use of locally available waste materials from the lime stone quarry and the granite industry as a partial replacement of cement. Quarry sites and granite industry in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia produces tons of powder wastes in the form of quarry dust (QD) and granite sludge (GS), respectively, causing serious environmental prob...

The paper is devoted to designing an interface preconditioner for the mortar element method. After brief overview of the problem in Introduction, we discuss the mortar element method with different types of the Lagrange multiplier spaces. Next, we consider the domain decomposition technique for the solution of mortar element systems and outline the general framework of the solution of saddle-po...

In this study, alkali silica reaction (ASR) expansion and strength characteristics of mortar containing waste glasses are analyzed in terms of waste glass content and glass color. Three different colors of waste glasses (white, green and brown) are replaced with sand at ratios of 10%, 30% and 100% by weight. The mixtures used in this study did not show a considerable ASR expansion. All batches ...

The acoustic transmission loss of a finite periodic array of long rigid cylinders, without and with porous absorbent covering, is studied both theoretically and in the laboratory. A multiple scattering model is extended to allow for the covering and its acoustical properties are described by a single parameter semi-empirical model. Data from laboratory measurements and numerical results are fou...

A brick-and-mortar-like ultrasoft nanocomposite metallogel is formed by crosslinking cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) with ammonium zirconium carbonate (AZC) to trap and reconfigure dextran, a model biomacromolecule. The bricks (CNC) reinforce the metallogel, compete with dextran in reacting with AZC, and decouple long-time dextran dynamics from network formation, while the mortar (AZC) imparts bim...