Appraisal of surface-groundwater anthropogenic indicators and associated human health risk in El Sharqia Governorate, Egypt.

The aim of this study was to integrate hydrogeochemistry with a multivariate statistical approach to understand the various processes that control the evolution/contamination of water resources in El Sharqia Governorate, Egypt with a particular emphasis on direct/indirect risks to human health. To achieve this, a representative collection of 21 groundwater and 35 drainage samples was taken and examined for physical, chemical, and trace element measurements. Results indicated that in shallow groundwater and drainage water samples, the relative abundance of major cations is Na+ > Mg2+ > Ca2+ > K+, and for anions it is HCO3- > Cl- > SO42- (on a molar basis). Natural processes involving the dissolution/precipitation of some minerals and other processes including leaching of solid waste, overuse of agricultural fertilizers application, and high loads of discharged sewage water are responsible for the evolution of water resources in El Sharqia Governorate. Ammonia, nitrate, biological oxygen demand (BOD), phosphate, turbidity, iron, manganese, lead, and aluminum concentrations were found to be higher than the limits set by internatio2nal drinking water regulations. The health risk index (HRI) values for children were found to be higher than those for adults when the water resources are used for drinking purposes, which poses a risk to human health.

A Two-Dimensional Eight-Node Quadrilateral Inverse Element for Shape Sensing and Structural Health Monitoring.

The inverse finite element method (iFEM) is a powerful tool for shape sensing and structural health monitoring and has several advantages with respect to some other existing approaches. In this study, a two-dimensional eight-node quadrilateral inverse finite element formulation is presented. The element is suitable for thin structures under in-plane loading conditions. To validate the accuracy and demonstrate the capability of the inverse element, four different numerical cases are considered for different loading and boundary conditions. iFEM analysis results are compared with regular finite element analysis results as the reference solution and very good agreement is observed between the two solutions, demonstrating the capability of the iFEM approach.

Integration of groundwater vulnerability with contaminants transport modeling in unsaturated zone, case study El-Sharqia, Egypt.

Nowadays, irrigation uses large amount of marginal wastewater due to continuous decline in fresh water supply. As a consequence, using this wastewater for different purposes can cause some adverse environmental impacts. Anthropogenic activities such as septic tanks, sewage ponds, and polluted drains have large influence on deterioration of shallow groundwater aquifers. So, construction of many wastewater treatment plants in these areas is mandatory to control and mitigate this deterioration. Groundwater vulnerability assessment maps and contamination simulation in unsaturated zone can be beneficial in understanding contaminants pathways and groundwater quality evolution. This work is mainly focused on aquifer vulnerability assessment to pollution and the role of vadose zone in attenuation of contaminants transport through it prior to groundwater seepage. Therefore, about 56 drainage and groundwater samples were collected and analyzed for potentially toxic elements. The most vulnerable sector was determined using GOD method revealing that central parts of the study area are the most threatened zones with some scattered sporadic zone of sensitivity to pollution and this was verified through the zonation of Pb, Fe, and Mn spatial concentrations. The leakage of these elements through the unsaturated zone was further simulated using HYDRUS-1D model for the next 10-year period to determine the extent of the pollution plumes and maximum concentration of these elements that percolate to the groundwater directly. The concentration of Fe, Pb, and Mn at the end of the simulation reached low concentrations at the bottom layer of the unsaturated zone.

Isogeometric iFEM Analysis of Thin Shell Structures.

Shape sensing is one of most crucial components of typical structural health monitoring systems and has become a promising technology for future large-scale engineering structures to achieve significant improvement in their safety, reliability, and affordability. The inverse finite element method (iFEM) is an innovative shape-sensing technique that was introduced to perform three-dimensional displacement reconstruction of structures using in situ surface strain measurements. Moreover, isogeometric analysis (IGA) presents smooth function spaces such as non-uniform rational basis splines (NURBS), to numerically solve a number of engineering problems, and recently received a great deal of attention from both academy and industry. In this study, we propose a novel "isogeometric iFEM approach" for the shape sensing of thin and curved shell structures, through coupling the NURBS-based IGA together with the iFEM methodology. The main aim is to represent exact computational geometry, simplify mesh refinement, use smooth basis/shape functions, and allocate a lower number of strain sensors for shape sensing. For numerical implementation, a rotation-free isogeometric inverse-shell element (isogeometric Kirchhoff-Love inverse-shell element (iKLS)) is developed by utilizing the kinematics of the Kirchhoff-Love shell theory in convected curvilinear coordinates. Therefore, the isogeometric iFEM methodology presented herein minimizes a weighted-least-squares functional that uses membrane and bending section strains, consistent with the classical shell theory. Various validation and demonstration cases are presented, including Scordelis-Lo roof, pinched hemisphere, and partly clamped hyperbolic paraboloid. Finally, the effect of sensor locations, number of sensors, and the discretization of the geometry on solution accuracy is examined and the high accuracy and practical aspects of isogeometric iFEM analysis for linear/nonlinear shape sensing of curved shells are clearly demonstrated.

An ordinary state-based peridynamic model for the fracture of zigzag graphene sheets.

This study develops an ordinary state-based peridynamic coarse-graining (OSPD-CG) model for the investigation of fracture in single-layer graphene sheets (SLGS), in which the peridynamic (PD) parameters are derived through combining the PD model and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations from the fully atomistic system via energy conservation. The fracture failure of pre-cracked SLGS under uniaxial tension is studied using the proposed PD model. And the PD simulation results agree well with those from MD simulations, including the stress-strain relations, the crack propagation patterns and the average crack propagation velocities. The interaction effect between cracks located at the centre and the edge on the crack propagation of the pre-cracked SLGS is discussed in detail. This work shows that the proposed PD model is much more efficient than the MD simulations and, thus, indicates that the PD-based method is applicable to study larger nanoscale systems.

Modelling of Granular Fracture in Polycrystalline Materials Using Ordinary State-Based Peridynamics.

An ordinary state-based peridynamic formulation is developed to analyse cubic polycrystalline materials for the first time in the literature. This new approach has the advantage that no constraint condition is imposed on material constants as opposed to bond-based peridynamic theory. The formulation is validated by first considering static analyses and comparing the displacement fields obtained from the finite element method and ordinary state-based peridynamics. Then, dynamic analysis is performed to investigate the effect of grain boundary strength, crystal size, and discretization size on fracture behaviour and fracture morphology.